December 04, 2004
50 Optical Illusions & Visual Phenomena
Can you find the human face in this picture? The minute you see it, you will know.
This is a collection of extremely (trust me!) fascinating optical phenomena collected by Michael Bach, and with explanations by him.
Check them out here.
Also, I can't resist one more (completely still!) picture:
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Dave Eggers reviewed by A. O. Scott
"Since the triumphant appearance of 'A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius' (2000), a book some people will never forgive for nearly living up to its title, Dave Eggers has been busy with philanthropy and entrepreneurship, adding a book imprint and a monthly magazine (The Believer) to his McSweeney's empire, opening a tutoring center, 826 Valencia, in San Francisco, and a superhero supply store for children in Brooklyn. He has, along the way, consolidated his position as the magnetic center of a literary counterestablishment, a role that attracts predictable flak both from those who think he tries too hard to be cool and from those for whom he can never be cool enough. He has also published a novel, 'You Shall Know Our Velocity' (2002), and now a book of stories, 'How We Are Hungry,' the latter released with a characteristic disdain for the rituals of the publishing industry: no reviewers' galleys, no back-cover blurbs, no publicity. It would be easy to suspect this new collection, with its dour brown endpapers and plain black cover (with an ingenious elastic bookmark sown in), of false modesty, or of the kind of attention-getting, passive-aggressive self-effacement that has been one of its author's strategies for dealing with his fame, but it would also be unfair. The modesty is genuine, and appears to be quite deliberate."
More here in the New York Times.
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December 03, 2004
Obsessive Genius: The Inner World of Marie Curie
Brenda Maddox in the New York Times:
Hindsight is the bane of biography. Feminism is one of the most distorting of lenses. To see Marie Curie forced to sit among the audience in Stockholm while her husband, Pierre, gave the
lecture following their joint receipt of the Nobel Prize in 1903 is infuriating. What a way to treat a woman! One of the strengths of ''Obsessive Genius,'' Barbara Goldsmith's excellent short biography of Marie Curie, is its suppression of anger.
Goldsmith, whose books include ''Little Gloria . . . Happy at Last'' and ''Johnson v. Johnson,'' tells the remarkable story of the first woman to win a Nobel Prize without anachronistic editorializing. The facts of a working woman's life in the late 19th century speak for themselves. After the birth of her first child in 1897, Curie would come home from the laboratory to breast-feed. When that took too much time, she hired a wet nurse, then passed much of the child-care duty to her widowed father, who joined her household. What mattered was to get back to the lab.
More here.
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Ancient Roman Rest Stop Discovered
"Underneath a German bus terminal, archaeologists have found the remains of a 2,000-year-old Roman roadside rest stop that included a chariot service station, gourmet restaurant and hotel with central heating.
The building complex indicates that citizens of the Roman Empire traveled in relative comfort, according to press releases from the Press Office for the City of Neuss, Germany.
Historians theorize that similar road stops were located approximately every 20 miles along the Roman Long Road, which linked the North Sea coastal region to the tip of southern Italy."
More here at Discovery.
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From Bollywood to Hollywood
From Newsweek:
In India Aishwarya Rai needs as little introduction as a Hindu goddess. Since being crowned “Miss World” in 1994, the emerald-eyed beauty has starred in over 30 blockbuster Bollywood movies, been the face of Pepsi and L’Oreal in India and last year became the first Indian actor to be a judge at the Cannes Film Festival. Now 31, Rai is the Hindi film industry’s highest paid star, the object of more than 17,000 Web sites and has been dubbed "the most beautiful woman in the world" by none other than Julia Roberts.
Not content to rest on those laurels, the crowned Queen of Bollywood is set on expanding her kingdom. December sees the American release of Rai’s first English film “Bride and Prejudice,” an all-singing, sari-swirling Bollywood-inspired take on Jane Austen’s classic from “Bend it Like Beckham” creator Gurinder Chadha. Though British press panned the film last month for bastardizing Austen, Rai herself was credited with a charismatic performance. Rai’s Western credentials are growing fast: next year she’s starring alongside Meryl Streep in “Chaos” and Brendan Fraser in “Singularity.” NEWSWEEK’s Emily Flynn spoke to “Ash,” as she is known by her fans, by telephone from her studio in Mumbai about what it’s like to bring Bollywood to Hollywood.
More here.
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The Y Files
"Ever since he picked up and inspected a random piece of DNA in 1979 as a young researcher and later learned that the glob contained a piece of the Y chromosome, Page has devoted much of his working life to the study of the genetic package that confers maleness. The very idea of investigating the Y chromosome offends those feminists who believe that it serves as nothing more than a subterfuge to promulgate an inherent male bias in biology. And, in Page's view, some reputable scientists have even pandered to these sentiments by writing books and papers that predict the extinction of men--or the Y's disappearance...
Bemused and unrehabilitated, Page can point to a long list of scientific papers with his name on them that demonstrate that the Y is an infinitely richer and more complex segment of the genome than ever imagined and one that does not fit neatly into the prejudices of gender-based interpretations of science."
More here by Gary Stix in Scientific American.
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Inside the Leviathan
"Wal-Mart is an improbable candidate for corporate gorilla because it belongs to a sector, retail, that has never before produced America's most powerful companies. But Wal-Mart has grown into a business whose dominance of the corporate world rivals GM's in its heyday. With 1.4 million employees worldwide, Wal-Mart's workforce is now larger than that of GM, Ford, GE, and IBM combined. At $258 billion in 2003, Wal-Mart's annual revenues are 2 percent of US GDP, and eight times the size of Microsoft's. In fact, when ranked by its revenues, Wal-Mart is the world's largest corporation."
More here by Simon Head in the New York Review of Books.
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Novel held clue to writer's illness
"Iris Murdoch's last novel, Jackson's Dilemma, was about a mysterious disappearance. But it tells another story, according to neuroscientists today. It subtly reveals the onset of Alzheimer's disease before the author herself could have known.
Peter Garrard, of the institute of cognitive neuroscience at University College London, and colleagues compared early novels of Iris Murdoch - Under the Net and The Sea, The Sea - with her final work, and found that her vocabulary had dwindled and her language become simpler. Alzheimer's is difficult to establish with certainty until after death, but the evidence was there in her last work, diagnosed by computer-based analysis of word use, Dr Garrard reports in the December issue of the journal Brain."
More here by Tim Radford, science editor at The Guardian.
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How a Struggling Colony Became an Economic Colossus
"The United States occupies 6 percent of the world's land mass and has 6 percent of its people, but it accounts for nearly a third of the world's gross domestic product and leads in nearly every category of economic competition. How did this happen?
That is the question addressed by John Steele Gordon in his colorful, entertaining history of the American economy, 'An Empire of Wealth: The Epic History of American Economic Power.' Mr. Gordon, a columnist for American Heritage who has written a history of Wall Street and the laying of the trans-Atlantic cable, does not offer much in the way of analysis. Rather, he presents the essential ideas and innovations that have propelled the American economy since its earliest days, and illustrates them with striking examples. He has produced the written equivalent of a PBS 'American Experience' documentary, a gaudy cavalcade of facts, outsize personalities and fascinating inventions that moves along at a brisk clip."
More here by William Grimes in the New York Times.
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What's your law?
In an interesting bit of fun, John Brockman of Edge.org sent the following request to a number of famous thinkers:
There is some bit of wisdom, some rule of nature, some law-like pattern, either grand or small, that you've noticed in the universe that might as well be named after you. Gordon Moore has one; Johannes Kepler and Michael Faraday, too. So does Murphy.
Since you are so bright, you probably have at least two you can articulate. Send me two laws based on your empirical work and observations you would not mind having tagged with your name. Stick to science and to those scientific areas where you have expertise. Avoid flippancy. Remember, your name will be attached to your law.
Quite a few (164) replied with interesting answers, for example:
W. Daniel Hillis's [of Thinking Machines Corp. fame] Law:
The representation becomes the reality.Or more precisely: Successful representations of reality become more important than the reality they represent.
Examples:
Dollars become more important than gold.
The brand becomes more important than the company.
The painting becomes more important than the landscape.
The new medium (which begins as a representation of the old medium) eclipses the old.
The prize becomes more important than the achievement.
The genes become more important than the organism.
Check out the others, including Steven Pinker, Brian Eno, Dan Dennett, J. Craig Venter, Richard Dawkins, Nassim Taleb, Esther Dyson, Jamshed Bharucha, here.
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December 02, 2004
Polls say the darndest things
"Marcel Duchamp's Fountain came top of a poll of 500 art experts in the run-up
to this year's Turner Prize which takes place on Monday.
. . . .
Duchamp shocked the art establishment when he took the urinal, signed it and put it on display in 1917."
More here.
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Revolutionary Morality
In addition to being the centenary of Weber' Protestant ethic, this year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the first installment of Isaac Deustcher's trilogy on the life of Leon Trotsky: The Prophet Armed, The Prophet Unarmed, and The Prophet Outcast. It's one of my favorite political biographies, and it covers much of the history of the political fault line that defined most of the 20th century.
Deutscher was sympathetic to Trotsky, except for Trotsky's attempt to establish a 4th International, and writes from a sympathetic perspective. He wasn't ignorant of the horrors of Stalinism, which he opposed, Lenin's use of terror, or even the objections that a vanguard party would lead to a dictatorship. But he did believe in the project. Neal Ascherson explains it this way.
"The real abyss separating Deutscher from modern historiography is a moral one. An average British history graduate today will have been taught to evaluate revolutions on a simple humanitarian scale. Did they kill a lot of people? Then they were bad. Showing that some of those killed were even more bloodthirsty than their killers is no extenuation. Neither is the plea that violence and privation, the sacrifice of the present, may be the price of breaking through to a better future. George Kline dismissed this in The Trotsky Reappraisal (1992) as ‘the fallacy of historically deferred value . . . a moral monstrosity’. Monstrous or not, it’s a bargain with the future which, as anyone over 60 will remember, Europeans of all political outlooks were once accustomed to strike. But today ‘presentism’ rules, and the young read the ‘short 20th century’ as the final demonstration that evil means are never justified by high ends.
Isaac Deutscher saw history differently. His standards are not those of Amnesty International. Instead, he measures everything against the cause of the Revolution. The Trotsky trilogy has a spinal column of moral argument running through it which can be reduced to this question: did this or that course or idea help to fulfil the Revolution, or divert it from its true purpose? In the value of that ultimate purpose, Deutscher has solid faith."
Brad Delong raises an objection to this.
"The rejection of Trotsky's project today is not because 'today ‘presentism’ rules, and the young read the ‘short 20th century’ as the final demonstration that evil means are never justified by high ends.' The rejection of Trotsky's project is because we all recognize today that Trotsky deployed evil means not for high ends but for no worthwhile ends at all. The right attitude to take toward the Bolsheviks is that of Willard to Colonel Kurtz at the end of Apocalypse Now: Willard: 'They told me that you had gone totally insane, and, uh, that your methods were unsound.' Colonel Kurtz: 'Are my methods unsound?' Willard: 'I don't see any . . . method at all, sir.'
The Bolsheviks had no more idea of how to build a utopian society of abundance, democracy, and liberty than America's Silliest DogTM has of how to install a printer driver.
This is not a retrospective judgment. Smart people recognized it at the time."
But is that all there is to the problem of this moral justification? There's certainly no "'A' for effort" in politics and ends certainly justify means . . . but are ends the only constraint on means? What if people didn't recognize the limits of the project at the time? Would that have made it more palatable? Defenders of Bolshevism do point to Stalinist industrialization and the defeat of the Nazis as achievments. But can this absolve say the engineered famine in the Ukraine?
The standard "did this or that course or idea help to fulfil the Revolution, or divert it from its true purpose?" which admits of no doubt and no value to revision seems a road to brutality since it must reject the idea that we do not know what we will know in the future. Karl Popper's objections still ring true. Even Rosa Luxemburg recognized this in her chapter on The Problem of Dictatorship in her pamphlet, The Russian Revolution. And note that the objection came from someone who thought the project could and, in the end, would work.
"The tacit assumption underlying the Lenin-Trotsky theory of dictatorship is this: that the socialist transformation is something for which a ready-made formula lies completed in the pocket of the revolutionary party, which needs only to be carried out energetically in practice. This is, unfortunately -- or perhaps fortunately -- not the case. Far from being a sum of ready-made prescriptions which have only to be applied, the practical realization of socialism as an economic, social and juridical system is something which lies completely hidden in the mists of the future. What we possess in our program is nothing but a few main signposts which indicate the general direction in which to look for the necessary measures, and the indications are mainly negative in character at that. Thus we know more or less what we must eliminate at the outset in order to free the road for a socialist economy. But when it comes to the nature of the thousand concrete, practical measures, large and small, necessary to introduce socialist principles into economy, law and all social relationships, there is no key in any socialist party program or textbook."
But read the review.
Posted by Robin Varghese at 04:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
An Interview with Richard Dawkins
"Richard Dawkins, champion of Darwinism and scourge of religion, is a courtly and attractive man, although not much given to humor. If one finds oneself smiling frequently in the presence of this Oxford don—who was recently voted Britain's No. 1 public intellectual—it is out of sheer enjoyment at his gift for rendering the most subtle evolutionary ideas absolutely lucid.
The other week, Dawkins was in New York to promote his book The Ancestor's Tale. I had the chance to chat with him for an hour or so in the lobby of his hotel, as a particularly noisome soft-jazz Muzak system droned in the background."
More here by Jim Holt in Slate.
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What Reagan could have taught Bush about the falling dollar
"It's a scary time when economists wax nostalgic for the Reagan administration, but that's exactly what's going on today. Reagan, though no less an advocate of free markets than Bush, recognized the need for coordinated intervention when, during the mid-1980s, the dollar rose too high against European currencies. The pricey dollar was making U.S. exports exorbitantly expensive, leading both the White House and Europe to conclude that without immediate action Congress would follow through on protectionist threats. So in 1985 Treasury Secretary James Baker and Fed Chair Paul Volcker sat down at the Plaza Hotel in New York with European finance ministers and hashed out a deal, later known as the Plaza Accord, to flood the market with dollars. The market got the message, and over the next two years the greenback fell from more than 3 deutschmarks to 1.85."
More on the tricky economics of the falling dollar here by Clay Risen in The New Republic.
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Chelsea: Baroque?
Roberta Smith's recent article on the Chelsea gallery scene in the Sunday New York Times was informative Arts & Leisure fare, defending the neighborhood's exponential expansion in recent years as a boon--not something to bemoan--while also offering useful guidelines for the casual Chelsea visitor.
She suggests that despite it's megamall development, the neighborhood stretching from roughly w 13th St. to 29th St. along Tenth Avenue is in fact quite complex:
"The Chelsea gallery scene is exactly the opposite of monolithic or homogeneous: astoundingly diverse, a series of parallel worlds catering to different audiences and markets, from avant-garde to academic, blue-chip to underground. With art fresh from places as far apart as China and Williamsburg, Chelsea is messily democratic, the most real, unbiased reflection of contemporary art's global character."
But she also raises a provocative incidental point that would be interesting to pursue further. In the section titled 'Big Dogs Acting Like Bigger Dogs,' Smith asserts that, "The galleries that make up Chelsea's elite often present shows that, in their ambition, expense and importance, are tantamount to museum exhibitions...When [they] serendipitously stage related exhibitions, the effect can be overwhelming, an unplanned mega-exhibition more exciting and convincing than many museum efforts."
Given that admission to almost all Chelsea galleries is free to the public, this strikes a chord in the wake of MoMA's new twenty-dollar admission. How might we further concieve the counterpart relationships between private (and commercial) and public institutions in the cultural sphere? As galleries continue to produce more elaborate, historically contextualized programs, how might this change an understanding of their essential market-oriented position? In the age of advanced corporate cultural sponsorship, is there potential for more open coordination between private, for-profit capital and institutional, not-for-profit funding (as well as intellectual resources) in the production of culturally significant exhibitions?
Posted by Andrew Maerkle at 01:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
December 01, 2004
What is Project Life Line and why is it worthy of our support?
As we are all too depressingly aware, there are scores of armed conflicts raging in the world today. These often result in displaced populations, which leaves the UN and other relief agencies scrambling to provide temporary shelter, water, medical care, etc., mostly in the form of what end up as tent-cities. In addition, populations all over the world are regularly subject to famine, storms, earthquakes, and other disasters which also result in large numbers of displaced people.
Shabbir Kazmi is an upcoming New York architect who has thought up an elegant and brilliant solution of the why-hasn't-anyone-else-done-this? variety, for the provision of medical care, shelter, drinking water, and energy for these situations: he has designed medical mobile-units which can pump and purify ground-water and also collected rain water, which deploy solar-panels and wind-turbines for electricity, and which fit right into standard shipping containers. The beauty of this scheme is that these containers are cheaply available, and most important of all, they are designed to be shipped, so, can be gotten anywhere in the world in large numbers very quickly, by ship and/or train, and then by truck. There are several types of container-based units that can be deployed to an afflicted region, such as mobile medical-units, mobile dwelling-units (which may contain other emergency supplies, such as food aid, blankets, etc.), and school and dormitory units.
Architecture is a field which usually brings to mind the glamorous housing of the rich, the glitzy office towers of commerce, or the fancy designs of the buildings which in our secular society function as shrines to high art: museums. It is a testament to Shabbir’s inventiveness, as well as to his acutely developed moral sense, that he has chosen to apply his ample architectural talents in a socially conscious way. As he said to me, “Architecture is not just a luxury profession, we can actually save lives.”
Shabbir has started a non-profit organization called Project Life-Line which will build the first prototypes for these container-based systems in the next few months. They are raising funds and are having a benefit concert on December 6, 2004, this coming Monday, in Manhattan. Please check out details of the project at http://www.project-lifeline.org and do come to the concert if you can. (Click on "Who We Are" and on "Project" at the site.) This is surely a very worthwhile project, please support it as best you can. Thank you
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Phones as Hackable Platforms
Douglas RushKoff, of New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program, reports on a talk that our own 3 Quarks editor Marko Ahtisaari gave at NYU:
The mobile industry is stuck. But don't start printing out those resumes quite yet. A new romance may give the industry just the kick it needs, if we are to put faith in the words of the intriguing director and head of user experience at Nokia's Insight and Foresight unit, Marko Ahtisaari.
In a talk he provocatively called "Phones as a Hackable Platform," the Helsinki-born technologist shared a dark and rarely uttered truth: "If we look at this industry and the speed of innovation, innovation has largely stopped." Speaking before a packed house of open minds at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program (where I run The Narrative Lab), he did not equivocate: "What have we had? We've had mobile voice, which was the lead application and still is the lead application. Texting, person-to-person, one-to-one messaging. And, recently, the only dominant functionality that we've added is the camera. We need new innovation on this platform for it to grow."
Ahtisaari understands that the most promising and compelling software innovations have always been born in the hands of playful users. Now more than ever, the mobile industry needs to put some faith in a history borne out during the Internet era. Just as the most successful companies in the software and networking markets have already learned, often the best way to develop a product is to let the users do it. In other words, follow the lead of the alpha-geeks, or those Japanese schoolgirls that Wired and other industry magazines have begun to champion so enthusiastically.
Defining hacking loosely as the "ability to manipulate a product either through hardware or software to one's own ends and apparently in a way that no one has guessed before," Ahtisaari offered appropriately diverse illustrations of this kind of creativity.
Read more here at TheFeature.
Posted by Abbas Raza at 11:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
On the Way to the Hospital, a Novel Is Born
Nancy Ramsey in the New York Times:
"Write what you know." That literary dictum has sent first-time novelists down some dark paths, and on some days and nights, the one chosen by Shannon Burke, the author of "Safelight," was as harrowing as they come.
Mr. Burke is a former night-shift paramedic whose experiences with life and death on the streets of Upper Manhattan inspired "Safelight" (Random House), the gritty, moving story of Frank Verbeckas, a paramedic and photographer in his 20's who, while struggling to recover from his father's suicide, falls in love with a young woman who has AIDS. Reviewing the novel in The New York Times Book Review, Julia Livshin called it an "accomplished and haunting debut" and "a minimalist tour de force."
More here.
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Computers confront the art experts
"Automated method seems to spot forgeries as well as a connoisseur does... The technique, devised by computer scientist Hany Farid and colleagues at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, identifies the artist by analysing an individual's characteristic brush or pen strokes. It is able to distinguish eight drawings by Bruegel, deemed authentic by art experts, from five acknowledged imitations.
Farid's program suggests that a painting attributed to the Italian Renaissance artist Pietro Perugino was in fact produced by at least four different artists (presumably Perugino's apprentices in his workshop). This analysis is also supported by the judgement of art historians."
More here from Nature.
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How do Internet search engines work?
Javed Mostafa, the Victor Yngve Associate Professor of information science and director of the Laboratory of Applied Informatics at Indiana University, Bloomington, explains in Scientific American:
There is a multitude of information providers on the web. These include the commonly known and publicly available sources such as Google, InfoSeek, NorthernLight and AltaVista, to name a few. A second group of sources--sometimes referred to as the "hidden web"--is much larger than the public web in terms of the amount of information they provide. This latter group includes sources such as Lexis-Nexis, Dialog, Ingenta and LoC. They remain hidden for various reasons: they may not allow other information providers access to their content; they may require subscription; or they may demand payment for access. This article is concerned with the former group, the publicly available web search services, collectively referred to here as search engines.
Search engines employ various techniques to speed up searches. Some of the common techniques are briefly described below.
More here.
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Abdul Sattar Edhi, Pakistan's Shining Star
Abdul Sattar Edhi is nothing short of a phenomenon, a miracle even, and a ubiquitous one no matter where you are in Pakistan. His ambulances are everywhere, his clinics and homes for the destitute help millions. His story is truly inspiring. The following is from an article by Richard Covington in Saudi Aramco World: (Thanks to my friend Nazo Kureshy for bringing this to my attention.)
For more than half a century, Abdul Sattar Edhi, now 76 years old, has been living proof that a determined individual can mobilize others to alleviate misery and, in so doing, knit together the social fabric of a nation. Firmly refusing financial support from both government and formal religious organizations, this self-effacing man with a primary-school education has almost single-handedly created one of the largest and most successful health and welfare networks in Asia. Whether he is counseling a battered wife, rescuing an accident victim, feeding a poor child, sheltering a homeless family or washing an unidentified and unclaimed corpse before burial, Edhi and Bilquis, his wife of 38 years, help thousands of Pakistanis each day.
Starting in 1951 with a tiny dispensary in Karachi’s poor Mithadar neighborhood, Edhi has steadily built up a nationwide organization of ambulances, clinics, maternity homes, mental asylums, homes for the physically handicapped, blood banks, orphanages, adoption centers, mortuaries, shelters for runaway children and battered women, schools, nursing courses, soup kitchens and a 25-bed cancer hospital. All are run by some 7000 volunteers and a small paid staff of teachers, doctors and nurses. Edhi has also personally delivered medicines, food and clothing to refugees in Bosnia, Ethiopia and Afghanistan. He and the drivers of his ambulances have saved lives in floods, train wrecks, civil conflicts and traffic accidents. After the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, he donated $100,000 to Pakistanis in New York who lost their jobs in the subsequent economic crisis.
Remarkably, the lion’s share of the Edhi Foundation’s $10-million budget comes from private donations from individual Pakistanis inside and outside the country. In the 1980’s, when Pakistan’s then-President Zia ul-Haq sent him a check for 500,000 rupees (then more than $30,000), Edhi sent it back. Last year, the Italian government offered him a million-dollar donation. He refused. “Governments set conditions that I cannot accept,” he says, declining to give any details.
Read the rest here and take a look at the Photo Essay as well. The Edhi Foundation's website is here.
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The Weird Uncle: Albert Jay Nock
"In the popular histories of political ideas, there's no more omnipresent figure than the godfather--as in, Irving Kristol, godfather of neoconservatism, or William F. Buckley Jr., godfather of modern conservatism. But intellectual historians tend to unjustly neglect a very important influence when they trace their genealogical lines: the weird uncle. For American conservatives that figure is Albert Jay Nock--a man who died a decade before the first issue of National Review but who shaped its spirit nonetheless.
Nock didn't try hard to obscure his strangeness. In fact, he carefully tended his eccentric image on nearly every page of his Memoirs of a Superfluous Man, published in 1943. During his long career as a writer for New York's little magazines like The American Magazine and Harper's, these foibles became enshrined in myth. A misanthropic character, who considered Western civilization to be on a road to perdition, he viewed himself an atavistic figure from premodern times and occasionally wore a cape to symbolize his preference for the past. This sartorial detail also had the intended effect of enshrouding him in mysteriousness. During a stint as editor of the Freeman, he declined to give his colleagues his home address or to reveal more substantive details about himself. Van Wyck Brooks recounted a rumor that contacting Nock required leaving a note under a rock in Central Park. None of his New York friends or colleagues knew that Nock had spent decades as an Episcopal priest or that he had abandoned his wife and children. Had they read his Memoirs they would not have come to know these facts either."
More here by Franklin Foer in The New Republic.
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Manny Farber
There is a Manny Farber exhibit at PS.1 in Long Island City, New York right now and through January 16th. 
The exhibit has the interesting distinction of showing some of his earlier abstract work alongside his more recent representational paintings. The latter consist largely of from-above views of big cluttered tables. But they are flat and lacking perspective in a way that suggests someone who has come back to the world from having been outside, way outside, in pure space for awhile.
Of course, it is difficult to imagine Farber in pure space for too long because he is so exhuberant. He simply loves the surfaces of things, the colors and textures of it all. And that is also the way that he watched and wrote about movies. Indeed, you can't really start to love Manny Farber until you read his criticism and look at his paintings as a whole.
When you do, you will surely start to love him, because his generosity as an artist is so expansive. Perhaps I can reference my own further thoughts on the matter here.
Posted by Morgan Meis at 08:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
November 30, 2004
Red States and Blue States, Unite!
"The past few months have seen a lot of talk about red and blue America, mostly by people on one side of the partisan divide who find the other side a mystery.
It isn't a mystery to me, because I live on both sides. For the past twenty years, I've belonged to evangelical Protestant churches, the kind where George W. Bush rolled up huge majorities. And for the past eighteen years, I've worked in secular universities where one can hardly believe that Bush voters exist. Evangelical churches are red America at its reddest. And universities, especially the ones in New England (where I work now), are as blue as the bluest sky.
Not surprisingly, each of these institutions is enemy territory to the other. But the enmity is needless. It may be a sign that I'm terminally weird, but I love them both, passionately. And I think that if my church friends and my university friends got to know each other, they'd find a lot to like and admire. More to the point, the representatives of each side would learn something important and useful from the other side. These institutions may be red and blue now. But their natural color is purple."
More here from "Faculty Clubs and Church Pews" by William J. Stuntz in Tech Central Station (via Arts and Letters Daily). Stuntz is a professor at the Harvard Law School.
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Back Pain, Brain Drain
"Chronic pain may permanently shrink the brain, US researchers believe. The Northwestern University team had previously shown patients with back pain had decreased activity in the same brain region called the thalamus. This area is known to be important in decision-making and social behaviour. The team's current study in the Journal of Neuroscience suggests some of the changes may be irreversible and render pain treatment ineffective."
More here from BBC News about the work of Dr. Vania Apkarian and his team. For more information, take a look at the website of the Pain and Qualia Laboratory that Dr. Apkarian heads.
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The Verve: This Is Music
The Verve never made much sense in the context of Britpop. From 1993-97 British music was dominated by the Gallagher brother's laddish buffoonery, Damon Albarn's pretty mug and wit, Jarvis Cocker's working class escapist anthems, and Thom Yorke's barbed melancholy. During this period The Verve were creating moody rock'n'roll full of soul, darkness and light. Their final and seminal album, Urban Hymns, was released just a few months after OK Computer and on the same day (August 26, 1997, the day Britpop died) as Oasis' third record. The Verve lasted long enough to tour in support of Urban Hymns, but would officially break up soon after.
This Is Music: The Singles 92-98 is their first official release in five years and features two new tracks. The compilation culls together songs from their three full-lengths, as well as their first single, "All In The Mind". The songs are as good today as they were years ago, although this album only tells half the story. The Verve made complete records, they weren't a "singles" band. For a full appreciation start with Urban Hymns and work backwards through A Northern Soul and A Storm In Heaven. If only to gain a cursory understanding of one of the great and too-often-overlooked bands of the '90's, this will do.
Click here to view a full review of the album at Pitchforkmedia.com
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The New MoMA
MoMA's back in Manhattan at its refurbished and redesigned and much-expanded home, after 3 years of exile in Queens. I haven't had a chance to go look for myself yet (and at $20 a pop, I may have to save up for it!), but the press has been quite uniform in its encomia. Fairly representative of the laudatory responses is this essay by Peter Schjeldahl in the New Yorker:
Reopened now in a lustrous building by the architect Yoshio Taniguchi, MOMA is an effect: historical, conservative, magisterial. It works. The devout, incredibly expensive perfectionism of the building’s lapidary joinery and excruciating lighting may cloy—the God in these details is a neat-freak—but it optimizes looking. That’s all that really matters for the expanded display of a collection whose quantity magnifies its quality.
For a more critical appraisal, you might want to look at this piece entitled "Modern Immaturity" by Jed Perl in The New Republic:
The good news at MoMA--the building and the relatively straightforward installations of selections from the museum's collections--is so encouraging that when the bad news hits you may find yourself reeling. Far from accepting the hard fact that the time has come to embrace a solid maturity, a maturity grounded in an assessment of its glorious past that is at once forthright and modest, the Modern has insisted on remaining the aging hipster who long ago had one too many of those martinis and fled midtown Manhattan in search of the next snort of art-world cocaine.
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November 29, 2004
Falluja
Probably the battle in Falluja is a harbinger of things to come and not the end of anything at all. If the whole episode about the shooting of the injured fighter passed you by there is an interesting discussion of it here, as well as an open letter by Kevin Sites, the journalist who took the footage here.
On the same note, a new generation of reporters are making names for themselves covering this increasingly intense war. Dexter Filkins will be a name that people remember along the lines of Kerr, Halberstam, Sheehan, et alia from that other quagmire.
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'Magic Seeds': A Passage to India
James Atlas in the New York Times Book Review:
Approaching the half-century mark of a distinguished literary career, V. S. Naipaul has entered his ''late phase'' -- as scholars and biographers euphemistically refer to the productions of old age. Now 72, he has written (or published; who knows what went into the circular file?) 14 works of fiction and 14 works of nonfiction: a tidy congruence. Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, he is, after a lifetime of heroic labor, home free. What more can we ask of him? T. S. Eliot, after he won the Nobel, glumly described it as ''a ticket to one's own funeral.''
Naipaul would seem to concur. Last month he made the public announcement at a speech in New Delhi that his new novel, ''Magic Seeds,'' may be his last. ''I am really quite old now,'' he said, turning his biblical span into premature senescence. ''Books require an immense amount of energy. It is not just pages. It is ideas, observations, many narrative lines.'' And because V. S. Naipaul will no longer write novels, the genre must die. ''I have no faith in the survival of the novel. It is almost over. The world has changed and people do not have the time to give that a book requires.'' It is almost over for him.
More here.
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Sharon and the Future of Palestine
"For Sharon, withdrawal from Gaza is the price Israel must pay if it is to complete the cantonization of the West Bank under Israel's control. Just as important, Gaza is to be turned into a living example of why Palestinians are undeserving of an independent state. Under the conditions attached by Sharon to the disengagement, Gaza will exist essentially as a large prison isolated from the world, including its immediate neighbors Egypt, Jordan, and the West Bank. Its population will be denied the freedom of movement essential to any possibility of economic recovery and outside investment. Sharon's insistence that withdrawal from Gaza will be entirely an Israeli initiative and will not be negotiated with any Palestinian leaders seems designed to produce a state of anarchy in Gaza, one that will enable him to say, 'Look at the violent, corrupt, and primitive people we must contend with; they can't run anything on their own.'"
More here by Henry Siegman in the New York Review of Books.
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Ode to the Code
"The genetic code was cracked 40 years ago, and yet we still don't fully understand it. We know enough to read individual messages, translating from the language of nucleotide bases in DNA or RNA into the language of amino acids in a protein molecule. The RNA language is written in an alphabet of four letters (A, C, G, U), grouped into words three letters long, called triplets or codons. Each of the 64 codons specifies one of 20 amino acids or else serves as a punctuation mark signaling the end of a message. That's all there is to the code. But a nagging question has never been put to rest: Why this particular code, rather than some other? Given 64 codons and 20 amino acids plus a punctuation mark, there are 1083 possible genetic codes. What's so special about the one code that—with a few minor variations—rules all life on Planet Earth?
The canonical nonanswer to this question came from Francis Crick, who argued that the code need not be special at all; it could be nothing more than a 'frozen accident.' The assignment of codons to amino acids might have been subject to reshuffling and refinement in the earliest era of evolution, but further change became impossible because the code was embedded so deeply in the core machinery of life. A mutation that altered the codon table would also alter the structure of every protein molecule, and thus would almost surely be lethal. In other words, the genetic code is the qwerty keyboard of biology—not necessarily the best solution, but too deeply ingrained to be replaced or improved.
There has always been resistance to the frozen-accident theory."
More here by Brian Hayes in American Scientist Online.
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Electronic Art: A Hornet's Nest of Potential Litigation
"...the bigger issue involves the so-called 'secondary market' for these pieces, i.e., everything after the original sale from the gallery. As Napster and KaZaA have taught us, once creative works have been digitized, controlling their distribution becomes problematic. In video art, for instance, there is a trading site with everything from Matthew Barney to Nam June Paik available for bartering. Once files start floating around in cyberspace, the certificate of authenticity becomes paramount. And what if that certificate gets lost? That's precisely what happened with a Dan Flavin neon-light piece recently offered at Christie's London. Estimated at roughly $83,000 to $117,000, it had to be withdrawn from the sale because the owner mislaid the certificate and Flavin's estate would not issue another.
Worse yet, after a few decades of electronic-edition works shuttling through the art market's notoriously opaque channels, faked certificates of authenticity will surely start circulate (just as they do today for Modiglianis and Maleviches). At which point, no expert will be able to distinguish market-legal pieces from their digital doppelgängers. Electronic editions have an allure, removing production hassles for artists, allowing collectors to customize works for their environment, and offering dealers a chance to reap massive financial rewards for simply uploading data files. But perhaps it's not coincidental that one of the model's architects, Javier Peres, was a lawyer before becoming an art dealer. Anyone who switches too glibly into this new art-market mode will discover a hornet's nest of potential litigation and provenance battles."
More here by Marc Speigler in Slate.
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The Interpreters of Maladies: Maxime Rodinson and Jacques Derrida
From an essay by Adam Shatz in The Nation:
When Marx wrote, "The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it," he was not only taking a swipe at philosophers. He was slighting interpretation itself, as if thinking were an idle affair compared to action, where real men make their mark on the world. In fact, the act of interpretation is always an act, sometimes a veritable event, and, in rare instances, a harbinger of far-reaching changes. Maxime Rodinson, the distinguished scholar of the Arab and Muslim world who died at age 89 in Marseille on May 23, and Jacques Derrida, the philosopher of deconstruction who died at age 74 in Paris on October 8, were two of the most inspired interpreters of our time.
More here.
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November 27, 2004
A Talk with Robert Trivers, Introduction by Steven Pinker
Steven Pinker on Robert Trivers:
I'm very pleased to hear that Edge is having an event highlighting the work of Robert Trivers on deceit and self-deception. I consider Trivers one of the great thinkers in the history of Western thought. It would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that he has provided a scientific explanation for the human condition: the intricately complicated and endlessly fascinating relationships that bind us to one another.
In an astonishing burst of creative brilliance, Trivers wrote a series of papers in the early 1970s that explained each of the five major kinds of human relationships: male with female, parent with child, sibling with sibling, acquaintance with acquaintance, and a person with himself or herself. In the first three cases Trivers pointed out that the partial overlap of genetic interests between individuals should, according to evolutionary biology, put them in a conflict of psychological interest as well. The love of parents, siblings, and spouses should be deep and powerful but not unmeasured, and there should be circumstances in which their interests diverge and the result is psychological conflict. In the fourth case Trivers pointed out that cooperation between nonrelatives can arise only if they are outfitted with certain cognitive abilities (an ability to recognize individuals and remember what they have done) and certain emotions (guilt, shame, gratitude, sympathy, trust)—the core of the moral sense. In the fifth case Trivers pointed out that all of us have a motive to portray ourselves as more honorable than we really are, and that since the best liar is the one who believes his own lies, the mind should be "designed" by natural selection to deceive itself.
More here by Pinker, and Trivers's talk "A Full-force Storm With Gale Winds Blowing".
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November 26, 2004
Novelist Edwidge Danticat's Uncle Dies in US Dept of Homeland Security Custody
"Haitian-Americans watched in awe this week as a group of 44 Cuban entertainers applied for political asylum in Las Vegas, unmolested by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
The treatment of the Cubans could not have contrasted more sharply with the experience of Joseph Dantica, an 81-year-old Haitian Baptist minister who recently applied for asylum in Miami.
U.S. immigration officials took the Rev. Dantica to jail, where he died before he had the chance to make his case for asylum. His family held a wake for him Thursday at a Miami funeral home.
'He died alone in a hospital bed,' said his niece Edwidge Danticat, 35, who is a U.S. citizen. 'It's not that the others (Cubans) don't deserve it. But there should be some fairness.'"
Here's the story from the St.Petersburg Times, and here is an article recently written for the New York Times by Edwidge Danticat, before she learned of her uncle's death.
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THE ASTONISHING FRANCIS CRICK
At a recent memorial service and celebration of Francis Crick at the Salk Institute, V.S. Ramachandran, was among the speakers (others included Sydney Brenner and Jim Watson). The title of Rama's talk, "The Astonishing Francis Crick", is from the recent "Francis Crick Memorial Lecture" he gave at the center for the philosophical foundations of science in New Delhi, India, at the invitation of Professor Ranjit Nair.
V.S. RAMACHANDRAN is Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition and professor with the Psychology Department and the Neurosciences Program at the University of California, San Diego, and Adjunct Professor of Biology at the Salk Institute. He is the coauthor (with Sandra Blakeslee) of Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind.
As I was leaving he said "Rama, I think the secret of consciousness lies in the claustrum—don't you? Why else would this one tiny structure be connected to so many areas in the brain?"—and he gave me a sly, conspiratorial wink. It was the last time I saw him.
Read Rama's lecture here.
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Katinka Matson's Scanner Art
"Thanks to the use of the CCD flatbed scanner invented in 1975 by Ray Kurzweil, Matson's works feature not only petals, stalks, and pistils, but also the rhythm and depth that these natural elements can express if set in certain positions, revealing a surprising reality. The main difference between Katinka's technique and standard photography lies in the way the subjects are illuminated and in the shadow cast around them, as both light and shadow contribute to drawing details and colors in a vivid way."
"Through her technique, Katinka succeeds in giving us the vivid sensation of being immersed in a lush, fascinating garden."
Check out more of her exquisite work here.
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Bernard Lewis Revisited
"America's misreading of the Arab world—and our current misadventure in Iraq—may have really begun in 1950. That was the year a young University of London historian named Bernard Lewis visited Turkey for the first time. Lewis, who is today an imposing, white-haired sage known as the “doyen of Middle Eastern studies” in America (as a New York Times reviewer once called him), was then on a sabbatical. Granted access to the Imperial Ottoman archives—the first Westerner allowed in—Lewis recalled that he felt “rather like a child turned loose in a toy shop, or like an intruder in Ali Baba's cave.” But what Lewis saw happening outside his study window was just as exciting, he later wrote. There in Istanbul, in the heart of what once was a Muslim empire, a Western-style democracy was being born."
Article by Michael Hirsh here in Washington Monthly.
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PONTORMO, BRONZINO AND THE MEDICI
"Nut job. That was the word on Jacopo Pontormo, the finest religious painter in 16th-century Florence and guru of Mannerism, a late Renaissance style that crossed Michelangelo's pumped-up classicism with Raphael's skin-so-soft version.
Pontormo wasn't winsome nuts; he was spooky nuts. He lived alone in a room reached by a ladder that he could pull up after him. He was phobic about death. Mention the word and he fell apart. Excruciatingly self-obsessed, in the four years before he died, in 1556 or 1557, he kept a diary, often hour by hour, of every thought he had, every twinge of pain he felt, every morsel of food he ate. He was, in short, an exposed nerve for whom art provided the only protective covering."
Holland Cotter reviews "Pontormo, Bronzino and the Medici: The Transformation of the Renaissance Portrait in Florence," an exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, here in the New York Times.
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Benoit (of fractal fame) Mandelbrot turns 80
"Few people would recognise Benoit Mandelbrot in the street, but the intricate pattern of blobs, swirls and spikes that bears his name - the Mandelbrot set - is an icon of science. It has come to symbolise the geometry of fractals, patterns whose shape stays the same whatever scale you view them on. His life has followed a path as jagged as any fractal. Next week he turns 80. He tells Valerie Jamieson that he still has plenty of work to do."
More here from New Scientist.
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November 25, 2004
Marijuana Research
"...outdated regulations and attitudes thwart legitimate research with marijuana. Indeed, American biomedical researchers can more easily acquire and investigate cocaine. Marijuana is classified as a so-called Schedule 1 drug, alongside LSD and heroin. As such, it is defined as being potentially addictive and having no medical use, which under the circumstances becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Any researcher attempting to study marijuana must obtain it through the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). The U.S. research crop, grown at a single facility, is regarded as less potent--and therefore less medicinally interesting--than the marijuana often easily available on the street. Thus, the legal supply is a poor vehicle for studying the approximately 60 cannabinoids that might have medical applications."
So say the editors of Scientific American in this editorial.
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Alexis Rockman talks to Neil deGrasse Tyson
Alexis Rockman examines how nature is portrayed. His art is in the collections of the Whitney Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, and London’s Saatchi Collection. He recently completed the mural “Manifest Destiny” for the Brooklyn Museum of Art, which depicts the futur
e effects of global warming on Brooklyn. Additionally, he has co-authored several books, including Future Evolution with Peter Ward, and a monograph with essays by Stephen Jay Gould, Jonathon Crary, and David Quammen.
Neil deGrasse Tyson is the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History. His latest book, ORIGINS: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution, co-authored with Donald Goldsmith, will be published by W.W. Norton and serve as the companion book to a 4-part miniseries premiering on PBS on September 28, 2004.
Here is their conversation as part of The Seed Salon.
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Interrogating Arabs
"Michael Koubi worked for Shin Bet, Israel's security service, for 21 years and was its chief interrogator from 1987 to 1993. He interrogated hundreds of Palestinian prisoners, including renowned militants such as Sheikh Yassin, the former leader of the Palestinian group Hamas, who was killed in an Israeli attack this year. He claims that intelligence gained in interrogation has been crucial to protecting Israel from terrorism. He tells Michael Bond that, given enough time, he could make almost anyone talk."
More here from New Scientist.
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Amartya Sen on the history of Sino-Indian links
"The intellectual links between China and India, stretching over two thousand years, have had far-reaching effects on the history of both countries, yet they are hardly remembered today. What little notice they get tends to come from writers interested in religious history, particularly the history of Buddhism, which began its spread from India to China in the first century. In China Buddhism became a powerful force until it was largely displaced by Confucianism and Taoism approximately a thousand years later. But religion is only one part of the much bigger story of Sino-Indian connections during the first millennium. A broader understanding of these relations is greatly needed, not only for us to appreciate more fully the history of a third of the world's population, but also because the connections between the two countries are important for political and social issues today."
More here in the New York Review of Books.
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Philanthropy Ratings
"Warren Buffett is famous for two things. First, for amassing the second-biggest fortune in the U.S. as one of the most talented investors the world has ever known. Second, for an aversion to spending a dime of that $41 billion on anything but the strictly necessary. That includes declining to provide his kids with fortunes of their own, collecting yachts or racehorses, or giving large chunks of his wealth to worthy causes. Thus it may strike some as the supreme paradox that the man who is one of America's greatest misers in life will probably become one of its greatest philanthropists in death...
The year's other billion-dollar-club members include No. 1 givers Bill and Melinda Gates, the world's largest international donors, who made history this year by giving their estimated $3 billion Microsoft Corp. dividend to their foundation. It's one of the largest donations in history by a living donor. To put it into perspective, that one gift is three times bigger than the amount that America's richest family, the descendants of Wal-Mart Stores Inc. founder Sam Walton, has given during their entire lifetimes, according to our ranking."
Special Report on philanthropy here in BusinessWeek.
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November 24, 2004
Romare Bearden exhibitions in New York
This weekend I managed to make it to the Whitney to see a few exhibits, including the Romare Bearden show. There's a concurrent one at the Met, which is next on my aesthetic agenda. I recommend the one at the Whitney highly. Its only flaw may be that it's so sweeping that it streches the limits of focus and concentration on the individual pieces. But it does present a remarkable image of artistic evolution against the backdrop of the Civil Rights' struggles and how one member of the Harlem Renaissance engaged it through his work.
Arthur Danto has this to say in a review of the Whitney show:
"Bearden abruptly became Bearden around 1964--a miraculous year for him as an artist, when he broke through into a mode of representation distinctively his own and entered the calm waters of a marvelously personal style that was never again challenged, from without or within. It enabled him, over the remaining twenty-four years of his life, to evoke, in his words, 'a world through art in which the validity of my Negro experience could live and make its own logic.' By 'validity,' Bearden meant, I think, that his experience as an African-American was not ruled out as a 'subject of the artist,' to use an expression that was current in Abstract Expressionist discourse. And by 'its own logic,' he meant that the experience would determine the form through which it was expressed. The breakthrough, however, has to be understood through the collusion of two moments, one art-historical and the other political."
You can see it in the exhibition. (Also check out Adam Shatz's interview with Branford Marsalis on the influence of Bearden on jazz.)
On the simplest, visceral level, wow, what one can do with collages!
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An Important Question
I would like to direct your attention to a post on my friend, and fellow 3quarker Josh Tyree's, column at Old Town Review, American Notes for General Circulation. I think it is an important piece of writing. It attempts to stake out a position that I would, personally, be honored to associate myself with. Probably I am not intellectually careful or honest enough to do the position justice but Mr. Tyree is.
Tyree is trying to find a way to be anti-war without repeating the failures of the New Left during Vietnam.
It has become clear to me and becomes clearer with every passing moment that serious thinking about Vietnam is the most important thing in the world right now. The trick is that such thinking is more complicated than one might assume. The Hard Left had the moral clarity to be against the Vietnam War. But they got almost everything else about Vietnam wrong. I'm currently reading Mary McCarthy's book Hanoi and Susan Sontag's A Trip to Hanoi, which she has since renounced [correction: this is too strong, she stands behind the book but has since decided that third world communism failed in most of its promise. 12/2/04]. Parts of a very interesting exchange between Diana Trilling and McCarthy from the New York Review of Books in 1968 are published in McCarthy's Hanoi. It is clear from these works that we've been through all this before. And it is clear that it is very difficult to tread the path that Tyree is talking about.
But I think he is absolutely right that we have to try.
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Centenary of Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
This year marks the centenary of Max Weber's landmark The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, one of the most influential books ever written in the social sciences. The book was written as a substantive and methodological response to Karl Marx, as well as an attempt to follow in Marx's line. The shift from the acquisition of what is needed to maintain a historically determined standard of living to the ever more accumulation of wealth in the form of the medium of exchange, money, was, as Marx observed, world-historical. This shift perhaps more than any other has made the modern world, and how this core element of capitalism came into being and why in England is among the most explored in economic history. Weber's answer was that Protestant ethic had a mutually reinforcing "elective affinity" with capitalism.
"The religious valuation of restless, continuous, systematic work in a worldly calling, as the highest means of asceticism, and at the same time the surest and most evident proof of rebirth and genuine faith, must have been the most powerful conceivable lever for the expansion of . . . the spirit of capitalism."
Needless to say, the claim has been disputed for a century as well.
Weber's life was no less interesting than his thought, and in the latter are echoes of the former, or so suggests Elizabeth Kolbert in this weeks New Yorker.
"Everyone who is part of the modern capitalist economy—whether he’s employed flipping burgers, writing code, or putting out a weekly magazine—has at one point or another considered that his efforts had an ascetic cast. We all accept the notion that our jobs ought to be more than just a way to sustain ourselves and acknowledge working to be our duty. But we don’t quite understand why this is the case. Post-nervous breakdown, Weber appears to have felt with peculiar intensity both the compulsion to labor and its fundamental motivelessness. And, if he didn’t actually come up with a resolution to the problem (either a good reason to work or a way to stop doing so), he did invent in 'The Protestant Ethic' a myth to explain his, and our, befuddlement."
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November 21, 2004
Back from Karachi
After a six week belated-honeymoon of sorts, during which my wife Margit and I used Karachi as a base from which to launch several short excursions including a 5-day trip to Sri Lanka, I have just returned to New York City. This trip to the city where I was born and grew up felt different to me than others. It was the first time that my wife, who is Italian, had ever been out of the first world, and my experience of Karachi was colored by her presence. For the first time, I experienced the various restrictions that women contend with in that increasingly conservative society. In Pakistan's sexually repressive culture, a Western woman (the few that are there) is simultaneously the object of hostility and desperate lust, something which made it uncomfortable to walk around in a marketplace or on the beach, and which meant that I had to make sure I was never more than a few feet from my wife, lest she be molested in some way. (As it was, nothing more serious than some catcalls and the everpresent unrelenting stares took place.)
Karachi is a more and more culturally arid place, starved for entertainment, increasingly religious, intolerant, lawless, and intellectually bankrupt. There is a small self-congratulatory elite which prides itself on its worldly sophistication at cocktail parties where smuggled Scotch greases the endless mutual admiration of the rich, and there is ecstasy and cocaine available for the raves that the children of this elite throw behind heavily guarded walls (something declaimed with great pride to me several times as proof of Karachi's modernity and refinement), but there is little sustained intellectual activity of any sort, nor a single institution of higher learning of a quality which could anchor such activity. On a given day, it is highly unlikely that there is live music to be heard anywhere, or a poetry reading, or a theater performance, or anything else for that matter (in a city of over 14 million souls!). Once in a while these things do happen, but rarely enough that the only entertainment available most of the time is dining out, or watching the proliferating channels on cable TV (the local ones being dominated by third rate sitcoms or religious programs and other unadulterated junk).
For the first time, I had the depressing feeling that I no longer belong in Karachi. It used to be my home, but we have gone separate ways. Until a few years ago, I still entertained the dream of returning to live there for a while, but unless I grow a beard and undergo a conversion to being a mullah, that is now no longer possible for me. Of all the places I have ever been in my life, the one I would least like to live in is Saudi Arabia, a place characterized entirely by violent repression of almost every playful human instinct, and by shocking hypocrisy, and Pakistan is becoming more and more like that than the culturally diverse, tolerant, and progressive society of my youth.
If I manage to collect my thoughts a bit, I may attempt to compose a longer essay about Karachi and what has happened to it in the near future. Meanwhile, Ethan Casey, an American journalist, has written a book about travelling and teaching in Pakistan, Alive and Well in Pakistan. Here's an excerpt from a review by Alex Spillius in The Telegraph:
The book starts slowly, recording his visits in the mid-1990s to Kashmir and Pakistan, when he was a fresh freelance foreign correspondent motivated to visit the area by an obsession with VS Naipaul, who travelled there extensively. His work finds itself when Casey, through the kindness of a contact, gains a temporary membership at the Gymkhana Club in Lahore, where he plays tennis with the elite, makes friends and loses 20lb.
Over post-match lemonade and tea, he explores this beguiling, confused country through its amateur tennis hands. They discuss the comparative benefits of working and living in the United States, of their culture versus his.
They discuss the dangers but merits of Islamic politics and the art of the backhand. Most importantly, they become his friends, as do his college students, who end their course with Casey with their eyes opened and their minds broadened. The author's real journey is a search for common humanity.
Read more here.
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