Book Review: Dancing in the Glory of Monsters. The Collapse of Congo and the Great War of Africa, Jason K. Stearns (Public Affairs: 380pp, 2011)

by Edward B. Rackley

How best to make sense of Congo’s enduring crisis, a tale of daunting political complexity and extraordinary cruelty? Many writers have tried, for no other African country captivates the western literary imagination as much as Congo. This fascination long precedes Joseph Conrad, who indelibly described King Leopold’s Congo Free State over a century ago. But faithful subjects do not good art make, and most western writing on Congo is unreadable or, at best, unbearable.

The sheer complexity of Congo’s dramatic history is one contributing factor behind all the dreadful writing. Many an author sacrifices compelling narrative for rigorous scholarship, resulting in a turgid swamp of acronyms for all the armed groups, the Security Council Resolutions and the doomed peace deals. Epic chronicles like Africa’s World War (Gérard Prunier) may be valuable to scholars but are so microscopically detailed as to be opaque to non-specialists.

Adventure writing, the other main genre of Congo literature, is equally abundant and can carry a plot, but the stories glorify the exploits of the author and ignore the Congolese. “Watch me as I commune with gentle pygmies, wrestle crocodiles on the great Congo River, escape beheading by a throng of stoned child soldiers”— setting the bar for unbearable reading. Common to both schools is the absence of Congolese voice; for both, Congo is a neutral, muted stage for the author’s performance (scholarship, “survival”). Faced with such output, one thinks, the trampling of Congo just goes on and on.

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by Justin E. H. Smith

The first thing you need to understand about the BDSM community is that we are committed to one thing above all: mutual respect. We respect each other's kinks, and we seek to help one another to realize our fantasies.

Some people have fantasies of being dominated, and those of us who help them to realize these fantasies are not in the end looking to hurt them, or to abuse them, but only to help them. It might look cruel from the outside, but in the end it's all about respect (and mutual pleasure!).

Some in the community even affirm their commitment to mutual respect by taking a solemn vow. This is what my partner and I did early in our relationship (going strong since 2002). I said, “Laurence, I hereby swear to respect the integrity of your person, to respect your will, and your inherent right to realize your fantasies, and I promise to help you to realize them without harming or abusing you.” And he said, “Russell,” and then went on to recite the same little speech.

A central part of this commitment to mutual respect is the choice of what are called 'safe words': when the domination becomes too severe, when the fantasy pleasure begins to cross over into real displeasure, the submissive is able to call a halt to the session by exclaiming a word that has been agreed upon in advance, such as usufruct or plutonium, which signals that he has had enough, that the fun is over and he needs to be released.

For a long time this arrangement worked very well for us. I would have him gagged and bound, joyfully raising welts on his buttocks with a bushel of birch twigs, when suddenlly he would mutter through the bandana in his mouth: baleen! Some other day it would be corn pone, or carpetbagger, or drumlin, or orange roughie, but the message always came through loud and clear: Laurence couldn't take it anymore. Laurence had had enough. Cease and desist, Russell. It's about respect.

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by Hartosh Singh Bal

For a tradition that seems to extend back to the Harappan civilization, our lack of knowledge of some key aspects of Indic religions continues to be baffling. One problem, of course is our inability to unlock the world of the Harappans. Signage and seals are available in large number but so far progress in deciphering them has been slow. Over the past few years an acrimonious debate has been underway between those who claim that we can bring new tools to the job such as Rajesh Rao and those such as Steve Farmer who argue that the script is actually no more than signage and is not in fact a writing system.

This argument over the meaning that can be ascribed to signage is reminiscent of another area of Indic studies, which while not mysterious in the same way, remains baffling to me – the meaning of mantras.

The word mantra has entered the English language as a ritual chant, a magic formula repeated over and over. As a definition this only partially conveys the sense in which a large number of Indians even today understand the word. Perhaps, in no other part of the world does a non-tribal tradition lay so much stress on the power of particular Sanskrit words chanted in a particular order to harm or heal. The mantra is at the heart of most tradition of Gurus and disciple where the initiation is connected to the passing on of a guru-mantra tailored to the individual disciple, often unique to him. This is a tradition that extends to closely related religious forms, such as Tibetan Buddhism, which also lay great stress on mantras. This is as far as healing goes, the ability to harm is also explicitly identified with the term. In popular usage the entire phenomenon of spells, witchcraft etc are often subsumed under the practice of tantra-mantra.

Interesting though this may be from the sociological or anthropological point of view, I am more concerned by what a skeptic or a rationalist is to make of this. One possibility is to ignore this as so much mumbo-jumbo (or tantra-mantra) but to me that makes little sense when faced with a tradition that relies so much on experiential knowledge as a basis for belief. What possible experience could explain the origins of this belief in the power of mantras?

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All men must escape at times from the deadly rhythm of their private thoughts. —Raymond Chandler

Last month I was a tourist for the first time in my life. I went to Athens and two islands in the Aegean sea. On the tiny island of AntiParos I felt a curious emptiness I associated with the matte heat of the blue air, and if I had a thought, it was that I could not think.

But you can’t stare at the sea endlessly. So I did what lots and lots of people do—I read detective novels.

And yesterday I devoured yet another Agatha Christie. And Saturday I watched the entire Bourne Trilogy in a sitting. At first I thought I was just maintaining the dusty mindlessness of my vacation. But no. The thing is I don’t know why I love detective novels, spy novels, thrillers–and I’m trying to get to the bottom of it.

And so, a little sleuthing. It turns out lots of wildly clever people have taken a stab at understanding the draw of the mystery, the thriller. But the results are disheartening.

Just last summer Joan Accocela did a piece in the New Yorker on Agatha Christie. It was sort of a bio piece, but the verdict on whether or not Christie was a ‘real artist’ (most of the time) seemed clear. It’s revealed that Christie herself understood her characters as little chess-pieces to be moved about committing murder willy-nilly. Acocella’s article implies that the pleasure we get from a suspense novel has more in common with the joy of completing a crossword than it has to do with art, or literature. And according to the biographical sketch, Christie is no help in this. I’m a poet, and as a supposedly ‘literary’ person who feels mildly guilty reading formulaic mysteries, my guilt is totally confirmed when I learn that the author felt guilty about writing them.

But what is going on here? Why would Christie and I repeatedly submit to this exchange of guilt- feelings, each sure that we are somehow superior to the shameful activity we’re engaged in?

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by Fred Zackel

Does your god have a penis?

No, really. Yes, I am going somewhere with this train of thought. See, for example, if Jesus was married, then He had to use His penis, or He really wasn’t married, was He? Oh. You don’t like the image in your imagination. Geez, you got a naughty mind.

A question of morality, you say? If we think it’s disgusting, then we mean it’s immoral. A good working definition right out of Evolutionary Psychology for a world of relativism.

Think of Osiris. In one version, he got chopped piece by piece by his enemy Set, who scattered the god’s pieces everywhere on the planet. Isis, who was Osiris’s sister and wife, scrambled around on all fours and found all the pieces of Osiris, save one. You guessed it. Her spouse’s penis. Think about it: Isis, the goddess of fertility with an impotent husband. Sheesh. That is the very definition of irony, right?

(I have noticed the God of Irony always seems to trump the God of Justice. I always wondered: Was Oedipus alive just to entertain the gods?)

I bring up Isis because wives are linked to their husbands’ penises; she cannot be his wife if he has no penis, right? Well, conventional wisdom says.

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by Haider Shahbaz

“To be exiled is not to disappear but to shrink, to slowly or quickly get smaller and smaller until we reach our real height, the true height of the self.” – Roberto Bolano, Exiles.

“You must remember that there is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and good for life in the future than some good memory, especially a memory of childhood, of home.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov.

I packed my bags, and came to Paris. I am trying to write. What better place to write, I thought? After all: Hemingway, Stein, Cowley, Joyce, Fitzgerald. Also, my introduction to American fiction: James Baldwin. He came to Paris so as not to commit suicide, and to write. Preparing for my writing, I read ‘A Moveable Feast’ and reread ‘The Sun Also Rises’. I got drunk. I went to the graves of Abelard and Heloise and Sartre and Beauvoir. I accepted Baudelaire as a prophet and became a flaneur. I visited the Latin Quarter and tried to sniff out the ghost of a young Danny the Red. I read about Malte Laurids Brigge and I read the essays of Benjamin. I got high while I read Baudelaire and Benjamin. I even saw Midnight in Paris: It was cute.

But I didn’t write. I couldn’t write – no words, no stories, came to my mind. Unfortunately dear reader, the history of my travel and my failure to write neither begins nor ends at Paris. It begins, in fact, with my first love.

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by James McGirk

I never had a problem with Alaskan Senator Ted Steven’s oft-mocked remark about the Internet being a series of tubes. I saw it with my own eyes (metaphorically speaking) as a teenager growing up in New Delhi. The Internet was a feed of information that trickled in drip by drip, slowly increasing as we switched our faucets and eventually tapped into the municipal supply. My father was a foreign correspondent, which meant he had to send stories back home to be published. When we left “on assignment” to India he was issued with a bag of sophisticated telecommunications equipment. We plugged it in and became early adopters.

Our first modem looked like a cross between a swimming cap, a spider, and a rubber truncheon. There were two cups that stretched over the mouthpiece and receiver of a standard analogue telephone. One contained a microphone and the other a speaker. The modem would whistle and hiss signals into the phone, and listen for responses. It was a crude but robust system, the only thing capable of working on lines that were filled with crackling static and echoes, and may well have been tapped. Entire sentences would be garbled by line noise, or more insidiously the changes could be almost invisible. A pound sterling inserted where a dollar sign once stood.

Dad’s squealing octopus of a modem might have made things easier for everyone else, but it tossed a sabot into the gears of my imagination. Before we had left, he had taken me on a tour of his office and the printing press below. Communications made sense to me afterward. The newspaper was like a factory: an office space above filled with glowing amber terminals and stuttering typewriters and piles of important paper being fed to the machines below. The presses were magnificent, booming and huffing and spattering ink at rolling reams of paper. I could easily imagine the process as an unbroken chain extending across the world, see a pale English editor with a phone clenched between his shoulder and ear, transcribing dad’s story click by click into a typesetting machine to be turned to molten lead, slotted into a drum, dunked in ink and pressed onto fresh newsprint a hundred times a minute.

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by George Wilkinson

The Motion Aftereffect illusion, or Waterfall illusion, occurs when prolonged viewing of motion in one direction makes a subsequently viewed stationary item appear to move in the opposite direction. An example is seen in this short video. The viewer fixates on a stationary blue point near a pattern moving toward the top of the screen. When the pattern is replaced with a fixed photograph of a waterfall, the water appears to flow toward the bottom. We see motion because our visual system adapted to the upward motion of the first stimulus, and that adaptation carries over for a few seconds affecting our perception of the stationary image.

This illusion is thought to reflect adaptation of neurons in the visual cortex responsible for detecting motion. In this model, overall motion perception results from a comparison of the relative firing patterns among neurons sensitive to diverse specific directions of motion. A stationary scene results in balanced outputs for all directions. In the classical Motion Aftereffect illusion, prolonged stimulation with one direction of motion leads to decreased output by the neurons sensitive to that direction of motion. When the stimulus is removed, output from that set of neurons remains lowered. But because the output from the other motion-sensitive neurons is higher by comparison, the resultant imbalance creates the perception of motion opposite to the original moving stimulus.

Althoug classical studies of the Motion Aftereffect illusion used a conditioning stimulus lasting several seconds, it is known that neuronal adaptation can occur much more quickly– on a timescale of milliseconds. Could perceptual adaptation be observed at brief timescales, relevant to the timescales in which neurons adapt? A recent study from the lab of Duje Tadin finds that the Motion aftereffect illusion can be observed even after very brief exposure to a moving stimulus. Subjects shown a video of a pattern that is moving for only 1/40 of a second (25 milliseconds) – so short that they can’t consciously distinguish its direction of motion – will then perceive motion in the opposite direction of the briefly presented background motion when viewing a stationary object. The implication of their results is that the cortical processes involved in the Motion Aftereffect illusion could affect our perception virtually every time we view motion. The work of this lab and others suggest that there may be more than one brain region, and more than one neuronal circuit, contributing to this class of illusion.

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if I should give account of all the days that shame me
I’d be shamed indeed —especially by those days
that shame me by my own account

the noose that one gets in was once a collar
its no mystery how the world goes round
a penny for my soul, why not a dollar
?

by Jim Culleny
1/21/2010

by Meghan Rosen

Earlier this year, a London ice cream parlor debuted an attention-grabbing new flavor that made headlines around the world and sold out within days. The flavor, Baby Gaga, was infused with Madagascan vanilla and lemon zest and served in a martini glass chilled with liquid nitrogen. But at over $22 a serving, customers weren’t coming for its gourmet spices or upscale presentation; they were coming for its star ingredient, its claim to fame: human breast milk.

Just a week after giving birth, women who exclusively breastfeed produce, on average, more than 500 milliliters of milk per day. In parlor measurements, that’s about a pint of liquid. At 6 weeks, this amount has typically increased by about 50%; in some highly productive women, it can even double. For women with an abundant supply, excess milk can be drawn out with an electric pump and stored for future consumption (by baby, or in London, by high-paying ice cream connoisseurs.)

In an interview with the Daily Mail, the London parlor’s proprietor played up the novelty of his new flavor, but his description of its taste (‘creamy and rich’) was comfortably familiar. Flavor-wise, how does milk from humans compare to milk from cows? Can you even taste a difference? I don’t live in London, but I do have an ice cream maker. It’s in my freezer, right next to 2 liters of frozen breast milk.

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Matryoshka Boxes

Ah, to think outside the box.
But this box is too big —more than
light years across (limitless in fact)
so thinking out there has been a problem
and (with the way it’s been)
seems to be pretty much impossible

A thought that big
(a thought outside this box)
would be divine

To think outside this box
requires a perspective well beyond
the confines of a FedEx container
or even the boxes that were
the World Trade Center:

two boxes
fools were thinking outside of
while simultaneously cogitating
within another:
the box
that’s been our cage
since Cain killed Abel

two boxes
they incinerated with the
psychopathic bliss of someone opening
the box once belonging to Pandora;
a box out of which grim thoughts flew
to be reconceived and reworked
outside of
a box
within our box
within a box
upon god’s table

.
by Jim Culleny, 7/1/11

by Hasan Altaf

It seems like everyone I speak to has loved Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, and the reviews have also been generally glowing. My search for someone who shared my less rapturous feeling has so far been largely fruitless, and at this point I am beginning to think that there might be something wrong not with the movie, but with me. Midnight in Paris seemed to me kind of like a meringue: Light, harmless, and not entirely satisfying.

There is of course nothing at all wrong with meringues; they are what they are, and the kind of film that one enjoys while watching and then forgets about also serves a purpose. This is the land of summer comedies (Bad Teacher), the new crop of identical, CGI-enhanced superhero movies (take your pick), and even the vast majority of Bollywood. None of these genres, though, is greeted with the kind of rave reviews that Midnight in Paris has garnered.

Beyond the fact of Paris, the film has three things, as far as I can see, working in its favor. The music and the cinematography are undeniably great, but most of us don’t, in the end, watch movies for the cinematography or the music – at the Oscars, these are the categories we tend to glaze over, not recognizing any of the names, although we can appreciate their accomplishments when we see or hear them. On their own, these two feats don’t seem to merit the kind of reaction that the film has received.

The real selling point of Midnight in Paris is the conceit: The idea of the unexpected opportunity for a modern-day man to visit, each night, an era that he has always in some sense longed for, to rub shoulders with his idols, to sit across the table and be bored to tears by geniuses in the flesh. It’s a charming idea, a what-if game brought to life, and it’s hard to resist; it allows the audience to imagine themselves in that scenario, to wonder what it would happen if we could visit the periods of history that have enchanted each of us and meet whoever it was we always wanted to hang out with.

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by Jen Paton

This week, President Obama did a new thing with technology, conducting the nation’s first “Twitter Town Hall.” Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, noted in his introduction to the event that “millions of people around the world” use Twitter to “instantly connect to what is meaningful to them.” “Much of this conversation is made up of everyday people engaged in spirited debate about the future of their countries,” he added.

Viewers were given a Web address to submit questions to the president and urged by the baby faced Dorsey to “get the conversation started,” though the questions were ultimately selected by various regional curators. It was, according to Macon Phillips, the White House director of digital strategy, a way to “try to find new opportunities to connect with Americans around the country”.

In May of 1970, Richard Nixon, a less telegenic president, tried to connect with Americans, awaking before dawn to visit, unscheduled, the Lincoln Memorial and a group of war protesters there. According to Time, “his discussion rambled over the sights of the world that he had seen — Mexico City, the Moscow ballet, the cities of India. When the conversation turned to the war, Nixon told the students: “I know you think we are a bunch of so and so's.”

Nixon’s ramble came at a particularly fraught moment in American history: the expansion of the Vietnam war into Cambodia had reignited the student movement into a nationwide strike, with 441 universities shut down. The Kent State shootings had happened just the week before. The nation seemed fragmented, and Nixon’s promise to “lead the nation ‘forward together” less tenable than ever. With the visit, Nixon, said Time, “was trying his best to reconstruct consensus.”

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by Jeff Strabone

When Cy Twombly died last week on July 5, my first thought was that the greatest living painter had left us. That's because I am a simple fellow amused by such games as anointing The Greatest Living Painter and The Most Delicious Dinner Entrée in New York. (It's the duck at The Grocery on Smith Street.) Less foolishly, I hope, my second thought was that Twombly may have been the last great classicist in a world where classicism may no longer be an available position.

The obituary in the New York Times declared that Twombly was 'stubbornly out of step with the movements of postwar American art even as he became one of the era's most important painters'. Despite painting in a style that would not have been conceivable before the late twentieth century, Twombly stood outside his time chiefly because his deepest commitments were to an ideal of timeless classicism. Although he may have sidestepped the many competing art movements of his day, Twombly's classicism revealed a definite partisan affiliation: he was a Dionysian of the highest order.

All the recent notices remind us that Twombly was the painter who left New York. A more fitting epitaph would be that he was the classicist who went back to the source. Though he admired the beauty of his native Virginia, a place he said had more columns than all of Rome and Greece, he moved to Italy in his late twenties. His explanation tells us a lot: 'I've always lived in the south of Italy, because it's more excitable. It's volcanic.'

In literature and visual art, classicism is work that draws on ancient Greece and Rome, usually with reverent imitation. The poetry of Alexander Pope, for instance, is neoclassical because of its devotion to propriety, balance, and decorum in a way that was thought to mimic the values of the Augustan era in Rome. But classicism is not simply imitative. Any classicist worth our attention converts, in some distinct way, his traditional sources of inspiration into new methods, techniques, and styles.

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