Where did they take him?
•••
Suicide as Scene and Spectacle: Notes on The Bridge and Aokigahara – Suicide Forest
Two of the most famous suicide sites in the world are the Golden Gate Bridge 
Eric Steel, director of The Bridge sought a permit to film the Golden Gate Bridge, without divulging his real purpose which was to capture suicides. He later managed to capture 23 of the 24 suicides that happened within his yearlong watch. He went on to interview families of the victims, in an attempt to understand their lives before jumping off the bridge. In another controversial move, he didn’t disclose that the suicides had been captured on film.
Aokigahara – Suicide Forest follows geologist Azusa Hayano on a regular suicide watch. He finds an abandoned car near the forest and notes how someone could have gone in there ‘with troubled thoughts’. During his trek, he talks about the history of the place, the men and women who come to hang themselves. He finds a skeleton which he deems to be at least a year old, traces of a human life—food wrappers, crushed soda cans, flowers and food left by relatives and a man in a tent, apparently contemplating suicide.
“I was curious why people kill themselves in such a beautiful forest,” Hazano muses.
Both documentaries try to answer this question, as to why especially vulnerable people are lured to come to these places to commit suicide. The families of the victims in The Bridge speak of problems they have observed, of their loved ones feeling alienated from the world. They try to understand, and bring forth stories, anecdotes, memories. Sometimes their eyes brim with tears. In Aokigahara Forest, Hayano shifts from theorizing about the state of society which leads to annihilation to saying he doesn’t quite get it at all.
Facebook 2, Arab leaders 0
And this makes me wonder, will people now stop saying that they don’t see the point of social media and that it’s an absurd waste of time? Of course, many of the things that people choose to spend their time doing on social media – see above comments re: Farmville and Mafia Wars – may not be the most productive things they could be doing. But, the same is true for almost everything; the fact that some people spend their time reading Harlequin romances, doesn’t negate the value of reading in general.
Whether its Second Life, Twitter, Facebook or a plethora of other offerings, there are many worthwhile, often beneficial uses of social media: disease support groups, public awareness campaigns, news feeds, educational programs, and more. Yes, there are an awful lot of videos of cats dancing on YouTube, but YouTube has also become a vital means of communication in and out of Tunisia and Egypt.
Necessary Luxury
by Dave Munger
I can still remember scoffing in my Intro to Art class in college, when the professor told us about objets trouvés and showed us works like Duchamp's Fountain—an unmodified urinal displayed as art. That's not art, I muttered to myself. If I can do it, it's definitely not art. Picking up some random object and putting it in a museum does not make something art. Art is something more than that (Of course, maybe it's not, but at the time I was quite convinced I was right).
When we were kids, Mark was always picking up sticks and shaping them into amazing things. I was particularly fond of a knotted piece of driftwood that he carved into a hydroplane with his pocketknife. Hydros are like Seattle's version of stock car racing, and here Mark had transformed a bit of flotsam into something any ten-year-old would love.
Eventually one of his parents gave him a set of real carving tools, and he started to make sculptures out of wood. “Wood is interesting to me because it had a previous existence,” Mark says. “Then it ends up dying and being made into something completely different. What it went through in its life affects how it grows, which affects what you can make out of it.” Mark created the sculpture above to represent metamorphosis; as you rotate it, the magical person he's depicted seems to change, to lose its skin and express its inner self. But the act of creating the carving mimicked the work itself (or is it the other way around?), as he transformed a piece of wood into into a work that expressed what he wanted.
The more difficult transition, the one he's still struggling with, is making himself into an artist. It's something I share with him, because I struggle with it too. The differences between the two of us are primarily due to chance. I've never had the physical ailments he's had, and unlike me, he wasn't lucky enough to marry someone who can support the irregular career of an aspiring artist (Once again, we're back to definitions—you can of course dispute whether a writer is an artist).
The Six Emotions Of Revolution: What Egyptians Are Feeling Now
by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash
Take a basic emotion: fear. Before a revolution can even get started, it has to face down fear.
After all, how do you prevent a revolution from happening? You put fear, massive fear, in the minds of your population. At one point, the Shah of Iran's secret police, SAVAK, had a surgeon cut off the arms and legs of a dissident in prison; then they sent his live torso back to his family and friends as a living warning of what could happen to anyone who resisted. A pretty effective fear tactic.
Revolutionaries swim in that fear. Like fish swim in water.
The conditions that breed revolution may be material: oppression and poverty. Egypt had 15,000 political prisoners to torture. Up to 50% of its workers unemployed. But there is something more lacerating than physical hurt and deprivation to consider: the psychology of revolution. A revolution is an intensely emotional experience. It has to be, to break the chains of fear.
Monday, February 7, 2011
Some brief reactions to the turmoil in Egypt
3 Quarks Daily asked a number of scholars, academics, journalists, writers and others to give us brief reactions to the recent events in Egypt. Their responses are given below in the order in which they were received:
- Akeel Bilgrami
- Mohsin Hamid
- Mark Blyth
- Frans de Waal
- Pablo Policzer
- Ejaz Haider
- Mona El-Ghobashy
- Gerald Dworkin
- Ram Manikkalingam
- Jonathan Kramnick
- Amitava Kumar
- Alexander Cooley
- Suketu Mehta
- Justin E. H. Smith
Akeel Bilgrami:
It is far too early to write with any prognostic depth about the spontaneous and ongoing democratic movement in Egypt. But two immediate observations: First, it is interesting to see American pundits on television, despite their pious support for 'democracy', uniformly expressing a subdued anxiety about what worse and chaotic things might befall Egypt now. These very same pundits expressed no such anxiety about worse and more chaotic periods to follow the regime change that came with the American bombing and slaughter in Baghdad, Fallujah…. And second, it seems at the moment that the best thing for Egypt is for this popular movement to prolong itself on the streets for a measurably long time since real political deliberation and genuinely public education occurs (whether in democracies or in dictatorships) only on the site of popular movements, not hugger-mugger in round table negotiations and conferences among leaders and advisers, not in universities, not in the widely read or viewed media, not in editorials…. Even in a democracy like the United States, people got educated into civil rights on the site of popular movements through the sixties, not by the classroom and editorial commonplaces about 'racial equality'.
Akeel Bilgrami is the Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy and the Director of the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University.
Mohsin Hamid:
It's still possible that the old regime will find a way to cling on in Egypt, that the army will find a new front man. But what is clear is that beneath the ossified surface of the US-backed dictatorships and monarchies that span the Middle East, from Morocco to Saudi Arabia and from Jordan to Yemen, something profoundly different is waiting to be born. Turkey and Indonesia may already offer us a glimpse of that possible future: a future of modern, moderate, independent-minded democracies, pursuing their own interests, and no longer obsessively shaped by security concerns. If Egypt can do it, then maybe one day Saudi Arabia can follow, and if that happens, so much that is wrong in Muslim-majority countries today, so much that is inegalitarian, sectarian, and stifling, has the potential to be put right. Here, in Pakistan, such a possibility gives me much-needed hope.
Mohsin Hamid is a Pakistani novelist and the author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist.
Having a Literary Experience
by Aditya Dev Sood
The plane shudders and groans, forcing me to look up. The rumble of the cabin has passed clear through my body, rattling my stomach. I give up trying to read, or even to think, allowing myself to acknowledge the inchoate signals emanating from deep in my bowels, rising up through layers of nervous networks up into the swirling bowl of consciousness that I carry around with me wherever I go. Yes, I hear you, I tell my mind-body, I hear you. No more cognitive demands — iPad off, eyes closed — let's breath deeply, unclench, and we’ll just ride this thing out.
The aerial maneuvers finally end, and the low rise of Nagpur city’s buildings begin to take shape. The airport is likely to be quite near the rest of the city, I imagine. The conference guys will be there with a sign, I’ll grab my luggage and soon we’ll be off and away. Still, something is happening inside of me that needs my attention. Am I just queasy from the hard flying? Is this maybe a fart? Or is this something more insistent? More certain of its peristaltic beat and rhythm, due to arrive, right on time, this Saturday morning at seven-thirty, as on every other good day? A lot rides on this, and I have to listen carefully to what my mind-body is saying.
Accommodationism and Atheism
by Scott Aikin and Robert B. Talisse
accommodationism, the cardinal sin amongst so-called New Atheists. The charge derives mainly from the subtitle of our book, “a moral case for respectful disbelief.” Our offense consists in embracing idea that atheists owe to religious believers anything like respect. The accusation runs roughly as follows: “Respect” is merely a euphemism for soft-pedaling one’s criticisms of religion; but religion is a force of great evil, and thus must be fought with unmitigated vigor. Atheist calls for respect in dealing with religion simply reflect a failure of nerve, and must be called out. Anything less than an intellectual total war on religion is capitulation to, and thus complicity with, irrationality.
In our case, the charge of accommodationism as a failure of critical nerve is misplaced; anyone who actually reads our book will find that we pull no punches. But we also think that, as it is commonly employed in atheist circles, the idea of accommodationism involves a conflation between two kinds of evaluation which should be kept distinct. Some clarification is in order.
Bringing It All Back Home (To Shillong)
by Vivek Menezes
Our first glimpse of Lou Majaw comes just outside the Guwahati airport – his face is building-sized, emblazoned high above the multi-lane expressway to Meghalaya, on an advertisement for Star Cement. These billboards turn out to be ubiquitous along our route. By the time we’ve wound our way up from the Brahmaputra floodplains into the cloud-wreathed Khasi hills, the legendary rocker of the North-East seems a reassuringly familiar fixture of the landscape, even the toddler in our midst chortling with glee every time his flowing silver hair looms up ahead, instantly recognizable even in the fading light that slowly obliterates the thick pine forests that line the steep, curving road to Shillong.
But when we set out to find him the very next morning, the man seems as elusive as the fast-rising mists that are a permanent fixture of life in his hometown. We knew that Lou Majaw doesn’t go on the Internet, but now we learn that he doesn’t have a permanent contact number, or even a particularly fixed address. Then we discover that you can’t buy a copy of any of his albums in any of the music stores in Shillong either.
Kant’s body and other natural disasters.
Part II of “And The World Hummed Back – or – Ecologists and Their Bodies”
By Liam Heneghan
[In the first installment of this series, A fly and I, I tell an autobiographical story, one typical in its general contours to that of many naturalists, of how in youth I acquired knowledge about one obscure division of the insect world, namely chironomid flies. Crucial to the production of knowledge about nature is the training of the body to comport itself in a landscape oriented by a sensitivity to the critters being observed (a “fly-eyed” vision). Rarely is this trained movement of the ecologist’s body recorded in the professional literature, even though it is an essential tool and methodology in natural history.]
Friedrich Nietzsche, in tones braggadocio, prefaced his intellectual autobiography, Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is, with the following sentence (suggestion: read it slowly and dramatically), “Seeing that before long I must confront humanity with the most difficult demand ever made of it, it seems indispensable to me to say who I am.” 
Nietzsche proceeded to review the challenges he confronted us with in several chapters with titles progressively more grandiose (or jocular, depending upon your sensibility): “Why I Am So Wise”, “Why I Am So Clever”, “Why I Write Such Good Books” and “Why I Am a Destiny”. My objectives are more humble than Nietzsche’s. I am inviting you to re-examine the relationship between the comportment of our bodies and the founding of knowledge about the natural world. Does having a body matter at all for deepening our relationship with the rest of nature? Though my objectives are modest, nevertheless it may be mannerly to take Nietzsche’s lead and say a little more about who I am.
Decolonizing My Mind
by Namit Arora
On English in India and the linguistic hierarchies of colonized minds
(NB: an updated version of this essay is here.)
When it comes to colonial quests, military might is what breaches the metaphorical Gates of Damascus. Regime change follows. Thereafter, the most efficient and durable means of colonial control happens via culture. Culture holds the keys to how a group sees itself and knows its place in the world. As Ngugi wa Thiong’o—Kenyan novelist, professor, and author of Decolonizing the Mind—has pointed out, ‘Economic and political control can never be complete or effective without mental control. To control a people’s culture is to control their tools of self-definition in relationship to others.’ [1]
When done right, the native comes to elevate and mimic his master’s ways, to see his own culture as inferior, and to look down on his past as ‘a wasteland of non-achievement’. He begins to defer to the colonizer’s ideas on fundamental things like beauty, art, and politics. In time, writes Ngugi, he begins to understand himself and his culture through the eyes of the colonizer—using the latter’s concepts, categories, and judgments. Before too long, he turns into a proxy for his master: colonialism with a native face.
How does the colonizer gain such control? The easiest method, explains Ngugi, is to actively spread his language among the natives, and to simultaneously denigrate the language of the natives as crude and unfit for proper education. It is amazing how much mileage this delivers. Simply make the colonizer’s language the lingua franca of imperial administration, accord prestige and upward mobility to those who learn it in colonial schools, and before too long, there is a feeding frenzy among a native minority. This has been the way of the great colonialists of history, such as the Arabs in the 7-8th centuries, the British and the French in the 19th, and the Russians with the Baltic States in the 20th. Ngugi writes,
Where Is Cairo’s Winter Palace?
by Michael Blim
It is puzzling. What are the immediate reasons? Perhaps all of the candidate revolutionary state-takers are dead or among the 17,000 political prisoners of the regime. Not to be under-estimated is the 59-year military rule and two generations of stop and go mixes of cooptation and repression. The figure of Omar Suleiman, the torturer, the renditioner, the Israel interlocutor, says much about the center of things in Egypt today. The sheer corruption of Egyptian state power scars his face. He is no Kerensky; he is evil incarnate.
Perhaps Egypt is better off without a Lenin. In any event, it does not have one. Must it forego revolution as well?
Mukodlu
by Rishidev Chaudhury
Five years ago I spent six months working on a farm about an hour outside Bangalore. To get to it I took a city bus thirty miles along the highway to a dusty crossing where it turned onto dirt roads and bounced along them for about twenty minutes before ending in the centre of a small village called Mukodlu. As we left the city behind, the occupants of the bus changed from office staff to farm workers, and eventually included goats and chickens. I once witnessed a heated altercation between the bus conductor and the owner of a goat that was soiling the bus floor. It was eventually resolved when the owner held the goat’s bottom out of the window for the rest of the journey.
The farm was only a few miles off the highway but was also only a few miles away from a game sanctuary. Twenty years ago, when Bangalore was just starting to grow, the area was entirely rural. Now it was an odd hybrid of small villages, smaller farms, urban overflow, the game sanctuary and numerous granite quarries (many of them illegal). Perhaps it was once good for farming, but now the soil was thin, stony and eroded. We grew rice, vegetables and herbs, and had a small shed for breeding silkworms. The farm also hosted an NGO that ran workshops on governance for women from village-level self-governance bodies (Panchayats) and workshops on low-cost herbal medicine for midwives and other community healers.
The Zone of Alienation
Diana Thater: 'Chernobyl'
Hauser and Wirth
196A Piccadilly, London, W1J 9DY
by Sue Hubbard
At 1:23 am on April 26, 1986 two explosions ripped through the Unit 4 reactor of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in the Ukraine. The reactor block and adjacent structure were wrecked by the initial explosion as a direct result of a flawed Soviet design, coupled with serious mistakes made by the plant operators. The resulting steam explosion and the subsequent fires released at least 5% of the radioactive reactor core into the atmosphere, though it was not until 2 p.m. on April 27th that workers were evacuated. By then 2 people were dead and 52 in hospital. Nearby buildings were ignited by burning graphite projectiles. Radioactive particles swept across the Ukraine, Belarus, and the western portion of Russia, eventually spreading across Europe and the whole Northern Hemisphere.
The graphite fires continued to burn for several days despite the fact that thousands of tons of boron carbide, lead, sand and clay were dumped over the core reactor by helicopter. The fire eventually extinguished itself when the core melted, flowing into the lower part of the building and solidifying, sealing off the entry. About 71% of the radioactive fuel in the core (about 135 metric tons) remained uncovered for about 10 days until cooling and solidification took place. 135,000 people were evacuated from a 30-km radius exclusion zone and some 800,000 people were involved in the clean up. The radioactivity released was about two hundred times that of the combined releases at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Millions were exposed to the radiation.
Against chrome: a manifesto
by Steven Poole
Please tear your eyes away from this elegant and curiously seductive prose for a few seconds and look at what surrounds this webpage on your display. Unless you are browsing in full-screen “kiosk” mode or kicking it old-school with Lynx, chances are your browser program is designed to look like some sort of machine. It will have been crafted to resemble aluminium or translucent plastic of varying textures, with square or round or rhomboid buttons and widgets in delicate pseudo-3D gradients, so they look solid, and animate with a shadowed depth illusion when you click them. Me, I hate this stuff. I think it's not only useless but pernicious and sometimes actively misleading. Won't you please join me in declaring a War on Chrome?
By “chrome” I don't mean Google's browser of that name, but all the pseudo-solid, pseudo-3D visual cruft that infests user interfaces in modern computing. For an example of Chrome Gone Wild I need only turn to Apple, who have somehow acquired a reputation for elegant and minimalist user-interface design while perpetrating monstrosities like this:
Can you tell what that does, and how to work it? Me neither, and I've been using it for years. (It is the Ultrabeat drum machine in Logic.)
The Owls | Filmchat on the Oscars
JMT: Have you noticed how many of this year’s Oscar-nominated films are about family businesses of one kind or another?
10:08 AM It’s odd…
10:09 AM From Inception and Winter’s Bone to Black Swan, The Fighter, and The King’s Speech. “We’re not a family, we’re a firm,” Colin Firth says in The King’s Speech. And several of these films feature rotten families trying to push the kids into their firms…
but the business side is something else, i guess
10:11 AM JMT: Yeah, on the other end of the spectrum, True Grit, like The Social Network, deliberately presents a total absence of family life. In another sense maybe True Grit presents a business venture that winds up becoming a sort of ad hoc American family. In The Social Network the business relationship is really more of a romance.
10:13 AM But for me it’s still the year of The Bad Family.
Monday, January 31, 2011
The use and misuse of Srinivasa Ramanujan
by Hartosh Singh Bal
It is not clear what French’s Ramanujan stands for in a chapter that seeks to explain the specifics of individual, social and organizational behavior on the basis of particular Indian traits such as religion or caste, but given the title of the chapter – Only in India – it does seem that French believes there was something particularly Indian about Ramanujan’s story.
This belief is not unique to French and has only been compounded by Ramanujan’s own description of the Goddess of Namagiri as the source of his inspiration. The result is that Ramanujan has come to embody certain romantic notion of eastern or more specifically Indian thought. Even those who want to allude to Ramanujan the mathematician do so in such terms. Paul Hoffman, in an otherwise entertaining book on the Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos – The Man who Loved Only Numbers – writes, “While Hardy and Ramanujan’s partnership lasted, the two men stood the world of pure mathematics on its head. It was East meets West, mysticism meets formality, and the combination was unstoppable.”
Ramanujan’s otherwise excellent biographer Robert Kanigel devotes the entire first chapter of the book – The Man who Knew Infinity – to Ramanujan’s religious and social upbringing. However important this may have been to Ramanujan the man, the claim that it is central to Ramanujan the mathematician does not stand up to scrutiny. Ramanujan did not learn his mathematics in a temple. By the time he went to school only a few of the traditional Vedic schools still functioned. They had been largely replaced by schools teaching a curriculum based on European science.
Quaeries #6: Doctor Smith His Demise
Justin E. H. Smith
Do you know what I've been doing, Isaac? I've been reading about comic sections. Do you know what those are? They are the Curves produced by the Intersection of a Conus by a Plane. Now look here, Isaac. There are not only Circles and Ellipses so form'd, but e'en edifying Parabolae and whimsical Hyperbolae. Some are most comical indeed!
What's that, Isaac? You say it's 'conic' sections about which the immortal Euclid held forth, and not 'comic' sections?
Now, Isaac, did you see a Signe hanging o'er the Door of my den, warning “Let no one enter here who is ignorant of Mathematics?” You didn't? Well that's why you're allowed in, you Orang-Outang! You are here to tighten my ankle-Clamp, not to out-do the great Roberval.
Now, to our Quaeries.
Firstly, for some period, o'er a decade of Years ago now, we repeatedly heard that jubilant Declaration: Whoomp, there it is! What was discover'd at that time, precisely? A great Treasure of Portuguese Bullion? El Dorado? Verulam's Fountain of Youth? In what barbaric Tongue, furthermore, does whoomp translate the wise Archimede's elegant exclamation, εὕρηκα? Wherefore, finally, did the Jubilation cease so suddenly? Was this Discovery at length only a Fata Morgana?
Whence, moreover, all this talk of 'Wikileaks'? Wiki, we suppose, is of the same Lingua Hottentotica as whoomp, but what is leaking 'round here besides my woe-ridden joints? Information, you say? First of all, Isaac, you know not to interrupt me once I've begun. But more importantly how could 'Information' be a-leaking and a-flowing when we are unable to receive so much as a single sensible Reply to our Quaeries?
Tunisia, Egypt, Uganda?
Historians are generally quick and correct to insist that we jump to easy political analogies at our peril. One of the first lessons of historiography is that grand generalizations are more apt to flatter an author’s own sympathies than to capture a disinterested abstraction of events. Did Tunisia, Wikileaks, Facebook, or Twitter contribute to the Egyptian uprising? Possibly, but who would have the hubris to argue that any of these mattered more than local conditions: the rigged elections in December that gave the ruling National Democratic Party 93 percent of parliamentary seats, the bombings in Alexandria that left twenty-one Coptic Christians dead, the thirty years of daily personalized humiliation at the hands of a brutal police state.
And yet it seems possible to respect the importance of historical specificity while also acknowledging that popular energies can, and do, spread. Not for nothing is the rhetoric of revolution and counter-revolution shot through with the metaphors of fever, contagion, and conflagration. When yesterday’s unthinkable prospect becomes today’s historical fact, we are reminded that possibility can be more than a speculative concept. The events in Tunisia or Egypt make us feel political possibility, they make us experience it as an emotion, a passion no less infectious than anger or joy.
That feeling of possibility has already raised new questions for Uganda’s president Yoweri Museveni, who celebrated 25 years of continuous rule last Wednesday and is widely expected to claim victory in the presidential elections scheduled for February 18. When the question of Tunisia’s relevance for Uganda was put to him directly, Museveni shocked no one by arguing that Uganda’s situation is entirely different than the one that led to the ouster of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali: “I would not want you to confuse longevity with performance…social conditions in Tunisia are different to those in Uganda which are improving.”
Going to the Shire
Now that I think about it, I met Sylvia because she introduced me to the Shire. At first, I thought it was a stupid euphemism but we grew into it. Gradually, it became a habit. I was new to the boarding school and she was a senior, two years older than me. Sixteen and Eighteen, we were struck with an underdeveloped pessimism unique to growing up. Sylvia was a girl of decadent tastes: cheap white wine, unfiltered cigarettes and fishing. The only times she tried to avoid these topics was when she was in the mood to impress boys with her feminine side but these little efforts were always doomed to fail. She could not stop talking about wine, cigarettes and fishing. How a Catalan girl had developed the habits of a truant Scot, I never found out. She never talked about herself. How I ended up being friends with her was something I knew even less about: something to do with Dostoevsky, the atman, salvia and short hair. It happened in a serenely fast rush like a tide coming in to cover my feet.
One Sunday, I was early. I recognized her coming from a distance. As she approached, she planted a noisy kiss on my cheek and flashed a wide smile. The two of us, foreigners in this vast countryside of Wales, trudged along the empty tracks and made our way to a forgotten bench, around fifteen minutes away from the station, hidden in unkempt bushes and facing the tracks. There she took out the ticket to the Shire from the front pocket of her fur coat. After warming it with her red lighter she sparked the tip and, hypnotized, watched it catch fire. We each took two puffs and kept passing. It wasn’t long before we were smiling stupidly as the cannabis set in. We were in the Shire and it was a very happy place.