Via Amitava Kumar, George Saunders in the NYT:

Let us consider Daniil Kharms, the Russian writer often described as an absurdist, largely unpublished in his lifetime except for his children’s books, who starved to death in the psychiatric ward of a Soviet hospital during the siege of Leningrad, having been put there by the Stalinist government for, among other reasons, his general strangeness. Kharms gave flamboyant poetry readings from the top of an armoire, did performance art on the Nevsky Prospect — by, for example, lying down on it, sometimes dressed as Sherlock Holmes — and was a founder of the Union of Real Art, an avant-garde group also known as Oberiu. His brilliant, hilarious, violent little stories, written “for the drawer,” are now being discovered in the West through translations by Neil Cornwell (collected in “Incidences”) and by Matvei Yankelevich, whose anthology “Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms” (Overlook, $29.95) has just been published.

Kharms’s stories are truly odd, as in: at first you think they’re defective. They seem to cower at the suggestion of rising action, to blush at the heightened causality that makes a story a story. They sometimes end, you feel, before they’ve even begun.

Over at YouTube, a Philoctetes Center discussion with with Edward Casey, Francisca Cho, Harry Eyres, Robert Michels, Mark Norell, and Christopher Peacocke.

The nationalist perspective – which equates society with the society of the nation state – blinds us to the world in which we live. In order to perceive the interrelatedness of people and of populations around the globe in the first place, we need a cosmopolitan perspective. The common terminological denominator of our densely populated world is “cosmopolitanisation”, which means the erosion of distinct boundaries dividing markets, states, civilizations, cultures, and not least of all the lifeworlds of different peoples. The world has not certainly not become borderless, but the boundaries are becoming blurred and indistinct, becoming permeable to flows of information and capital. Less so, on the other hand, to flows of people: tourists yes, migrants no. Taking place in national and local lifeworlds and institutions is a process of internal globalisation. This alters the conditions for the construction of social identity, which need no longer be impressed by the negative juxtaposition of “us” and “them”.

For me, it is important that cosmopolitanisation does not occur somewhere in abstraction or on a global scale, somewhere above people’s heads, but that it takes place in the everyday lives of individuals (“mundane cosmopolitanisation”).

more from Sign and Sight here.

There are few enough points of continuity between the official state ideology of Maoist China and the ideology espoused by the country’s leaders today. But the significance of Qin Shi Huangdi, First August and Divine Emperor and subject of the outstandingly popular BM exhibition, The First Emperor: China’s Terracotta Army, might be one of them.* In the mid-1970s he had a starring role in one of the more bizarre movements of the Great Helmsman’s fading years. This was the so-called Struggle between Confucianism and Legalism, an attempt to recast the whole of Chinese history into a Manichaean conflict between two ‘lines’. You had the Confucian bad guys (humanist, conservative, capitalist) and the Legalist good guys (harsh authoritarian proto-socialists, with History on their side). ‘Burying the Confucians and burning the books’ – for which the First Emperor had been excoriated by centuries of historians – was now reconfigured as the forward-thinking decisiveness necessary to crush backsliding and ensure the victory of the correct line. The modern, slightly (but not much) subtler version of this appears in Zhang Yimou’s 2002 film portrayal, Hero. There, the emperor voices in impeccable classical Chinese the sentiment that you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, or, to put it differently: the deaths of many are a necessary part of China’s rise to Unity and Greatness. The ‘resistance is futile’ film clips of the all-conquering armies of Qin, projected onto the walls of the Reading Room, look as if they use some of the costumes from the movie. Underneath the visitor’s feet are the old library desks, one of which was arbitrarily decided by curators to be ‘Marx’s seat’, in order to satisfy the curiosity of pious delegations from the East; not so very long ago, either.

more from the LRB here.

“I don’t think that I ever managed real philosophy,” Michael Walzer says in the interview that forms the last chapter of “Thinking Politically” (Yale University Press, 333 pages, $30), the stimulating new collection of his essays. This may sound like false modesty coming from Mr. Walzer, who is one of America’s leading political philosophers. But in fact, by forswearing the name of philosopher, he is merely trying to give a more precise definition of the kind of thinking he does. “I couldn’t breathe easily at the high level of abstraction that philosophy seemed to require,” he explains. “I quickly got impatient with the playful extension of hypothetical cases, moving farther and farther away from the world we all lived in.” Mr. Walzer’s essays take exactly the opposite approach: They set up camp in the midst of the world we all live in bringing the rigor of political theory to the messiness of political debate. It makes sense that Mr. Walzer is both a professor at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study and an editor of Dissent, the left-liberal journal: His theories are always also interventions.

more from the NY Sun here.

From The Boston Globe:

No one, it seems, ever had a tepid reaction to Bella Abzug.

Amy Swerdlow, who worked with her, said, “I learned a lot from Bella. I don’t think Bella would ever think she ever learned anything from anybody.” Edward Kennedy, one of her admirers, said, “She stirred the House in such a way to push her view, irritate, antagonize, cajole, persuade, inspire, and lead.” Geraldine Ferraro, on Bella as a role model for women, said, “She didn’t knock lightly on the door. She didn’t even push it open or batter it down. She took it off the hinges forever! So that those of us who came after could walk through.”

The portrait that emerges from the many voices gathered here is of a fearless, brilliant, dynamic, charismatic, assertive, abrasive, impatient woman. While she annoyed many people, she also inspired many and advanced the causes she believed in: world peace, Zionism, social justice, equality for women, environmental awareness, and economic equality.

More here.

Dennis Drabelle in The Wsahington Post:

Author Jeff Warren is summarizing a psychological study in which “one group practiced tensing and relaxing a finger in their left hands, and another group just imagined doing the same thing.” When it was all over, the finger strength of the physical tensers had increased by an average of 30 percent, but that of the mental tensers had gone up nearly as much, to 22 percent.

But if you look beyond the book’s flower-child title, as well as its numerous drawings and diagrams, you find yourself being instructed by a serious journalist with both feet on the ground — except when he’s in bed and taking part in experiments. In The Head Trip, Warren pursues his conviction that “consciousness exists in more widely varied and abundant forms than simple waking, sleeping, and dreaming” by talking with experts and submitting to protocols.

Salvador Dali used to trawl his brain for bizarre images to go into his surrealist paintings by sitting in a chair after a meal with his hands extended beyond the chair-arms and a key held between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand. When he nodded off, the key would fall to the floor, make a clink, and wake him up so that he could go sketch the melting watch he’d just glimpsed on his inner canvas.

More here.

Jason Wilson in The Smart Set:

I write a column about booze every other week for a major newspaper, and I often travel outside of the country, sometimes simply to drink some type of alcoholic beverage that I will eventually write about in my column. I also happen to be a father of two young boys. It therefore may not come as a total shock to learn that I am regularly seized by the terrifying notion that I am the worst, most horrible parent in the world. These moments usually strike when, say, I am sampling a vintage port on a lovely Portuguese afternoon or tasting a Dutch gin a stone’s throw from Amsterdam’s Red Light District, and then suddenly realize that back home in New Jersey it’s early morning and my wife is likely getting the kids ready for school.

Perhaps this is the reason that I recently took my oldest son, 5-year-old Sander, along with me on a business trip to Finnish Lapland so he could meet the “real” Santa Claus. So many acquaintances have asked me what on Earth possessed me to take a 5-year-old to the Arctic Circle in the middle of December — I’m still not exactly sure myself, but I’m guessing parental guilt played as big a role as any.

Even the elves at Santa’s Office, in Santa Claus’ Village, in Rovaniemi, Finland seemed incredulous that we should come from so far away to stand in line for something we could have experienced at the local mall. “You’re from USA?” asked the “elf” who logged our reservation to meet Santa, the one wearing a pointy hat and nametag that read “Lara,” who arched her eyebrow with the sort of disdain that only a local teen can convey to a visiting tourist. “What brings you all the way to Rovaniemi? That is a very long way to come just to see Santa Claus.”

More here, including a very nice slide show.

If R. Kelly was at all worried about his recent legal woes, he sure didn’t show it during his performance at a crowded United Center on Friday.

The Chicago-born R&B singer/writer/producer, who is finally set to stand trial in 2008 in connection with a 2002 indictment on 14 counts of child pornography, missed a courtroom appearance the week leading up to the concert and nearly had his bond revoked.

Still, the steady stream of controversy has done little to slow Kelly’s momentum. His latest album, “Double Up,” debuted atop the Billboard charts and has already gone platinum. But that’s not to say that the singer can’t feel the wolves circling. On a stage decked out like a boxing ring, Kelly made his way through the crowd like a prizefighter before lashing out at his detractors on “The Champ.” “Spread rumors/Point fingers/Throw stones,” he sang. “Hate me/Love me/Hug me/Curse me.”

more from The Chicago Tribune here.

Khan’s story is a three-decade-long cloak-and-dagger saga, one that jumps from Washington, Amsterdam and Johannesburg to Islamabad, Tehran and Timbuktu and drags in corrupt Pakstani generals, unscrupulous European businessmen and dissembling American diplomats. It’s no surprise that there has been a cascade of books on Khan in recent years. But the three newest — “The Nuclear Jihadist” by Douglas Frantz (a former L.A. Times managing editor) and Catherine Collins, “Deception” by Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark and “America and the Islamic Bomb” by David Armstrong and Joseph Trento — drive home the point that Khan is not the real story here. More important is how and why he was able to flout the nuclear nonproliferation regime for so many years, “ushering in,” as Frantz and Collins put it, “the second nuclear age.” Jonathan Schell, in his new book “The Seventh Decade,” calls this the era of “nuclear anarchy.”

more from the LA Times here.

It is probably the most negative book review ever written. Or if there is a worse one, do let me know. “This book runs the full gamut from the mediocre to the ludicrous to the merely bad,” begins Colin McGinn’s review of On Consciousness by Ted Honderich. “It is painful to read, poorly thought out, and uninformed. It is also radically inconsistent.”

The ending isn’t much better: “Is there anything of merit in On Consciousness? Honderich does occasionally show glimmers of understanding that the problem of consciousness is difficult and that most of our ideas about it fall short of the mark. His instincts, at least, are not always wrong. It is a pity that his own efforts here are so shoddy, inept, and disastrous (to use a term he is fond of applying to the views of others).”

And in the middle, there is nothing to cheer the book’s author. Honderich’s book is, according to McGinn, sly, woefully uninformed, preposterous, easily refuted, unsophisticated, uncomprehending, banal, pointless, excruciating.

more from The Guardian here.

From The Tris McCall Report:

Snoop Dogg — “Sensual Seduction”

Ignore the title, that’s just the radio-approved handle; real fans and bootleggers know it as “Sexual Explosion”. This is Snoop‘s long-awaited tribute to Zapp, which means he’s run his entire vocal through a talkbox. Poppin’, to be sure, but nine out of ten casual listeners will miss the reference and mistake this for yet another digitized T-Pain performance. (Is that the secret to the popularity of the pitch-corrected sound, I wonder?; that it reminds us of Zapp, the Mothership, and the funky vocoder?) Arguably, “More Bounce To The Ounce” and “Computer Love” were the two primary sources for the g-funk sound, and as Nasir the Fussy Archivist pointed out on Hip-Hop Is Dead, Roger Troutman’s name is barely remembered these days. Snoop does his best to resurrect it here, and in the process, he’s given the Westside something new to low-ride to. It’s a neat novelty, but to be honest, when he breaks convention midway through the track and begins to rap, it feels like a happy homecoming.

More here.  [Thanks to Asad Raza.]

From The Times:

China, Dubai, Moscow or Kazakhstan apart, there’s a shift among many young architects away from flash, if lucrative, bling buildings and towards, what? The uniconic? The spiritual leader of this not-quite-movement, Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, calls it slow architecture. Like slow food, this is about local produce that tastes good. It’s about that hard-to-define idea, integrity. Architecturally, it means back to basics building: providing beautiful shelter, addressing human needs with architecture which has longevity and presence, undeniably modern but also showing the mark of human hand. Its response to the bombast, fakery and crash-bang-wallop of globalisation is radical in its reactionariness.

In this year’s runners and riders in the AR Awards, for instance, you’ll find not skyscrapers and bling, but a beigel-shaped kindergarten in Tokyo with a huge rooftop playground, Madrid’s beautiful memorial to 2004’s Al Qaida bombings, a low-cost school for South Africa. This is tactile architecture, architecture that speaks of its social, environmental and spiritual obligations.

More here. (For Jaffer).

David Leavitt in The New York Times:

“Henry James: The Mature Master” by Sheldon M. Novick strives to supplant the common view of James as “a passive, fearful man, a detached observer of the life around him” with one of the writer as a gregarious, sometimes heroic, often troubled citizen of the world. Far from a sniffy celibate living comfortably on independent means or a “little boy with his nose pressed against the glass of a shop window,” Novick’s James was an authentic cosmopolite who led a life as emotionally, sexually and financially complex as those of the characters in his fiction.

Does Novick succeed in giving us a new, more “ordinary,” less cerebral Henry James? The answer, for better or worse, is yes. Indeed, the life that he describes (“The Mature Master” begins with the successful 1881 publication of “The Portrait of a Lady” and ends with James’s death in 1916) is one that, for any urban writer, will seem eerily, even tiresomely familiar. Passionately devoted to his craft, James is also burdened by the constant pressure to make money. He suffers from back pain and constipation, and often feels overwhelmed by the amount of writing he has to do: in addition to the novels, many of them published in serial form, there are the short stories, travel articles, reviews and “potboilers” from which he earns his living, not to mention the correspondence with which he feels dutybound to keep up.

More here.

“Merey Baney Ki Baat Na Poochho” by Farid Ayaz and Abu Muhammad Qawwal:

“Tajdar-e-Haram, Part 1” by Ghulam Fareed Sabri and Maqbool Ahmad Sabri (Sabri Brothers):

“Tajdar-e-Haram, Part 2” by Ghulam Fareed Sabri and Maqbool Ahmad Sabri (Sabri Brothers):

“Piya Ghar Aya” by Farid Ayaz and Abu Muhammad Qawwal:

See also Saturday Qawwali Special I and Saturday Qawwali Special II.

Hitchens in The Weekly Standard:

“How’s your drink?” was, apparently, the cordial question asked of his guests by Frank Sinatra, who didn’t like to think of anyone going short. “How’s your glass?” was the equivalent question (and, later, book title) in the case of Kingsley Amis, whose domestic strategy later boiled down to telling his more favored friends that if they didn’t have a full drink in their hands, it was their own bloody fault for not refilling without waiting to be asked.

That book was actually a quiz book, in which you could be asked “From what does Scotch receive its color?” or “What happens to a vintage port before and after bottling?” The answers were helpfully included at the end, often with a cheery wealth of extra detail, so the volume doubled as a guide and general adviser as well. But Amis also wrote two other drinkers-companion efforts, entitled Every Day Drinking and On Drink. (Interest declared: All these will soon be reissued in a handy single volume by Bloomsbury, with an introduction by your humble servant.)

Eric Felten doesn’t write as well as Kingsley Amis, which is no disgrace (he is a jazz musician, an occupation for which Amis had a high regard) but he does have a feel for literature as it relates to booze, and he has been out there on our behalf and done an awful lot of homework. His book, which is a distillation, if I may put it like that, of his celebrated Wall Street Journal column of the same name, is by far the wittiest and the most comprehensive study of the subject since the author of Lucky Jim laid down his pen.

More here.

Hugo Lindgren in the New York Times Book Review:

The comics collected in this book range fairly far and wide, but the strong center of gravity is plaintive tales of everyday life, set in the present, and usually about the social groups that comic artists themselves belong to. The appeal of such work is its emotional directness — in this age of highly branded, executive-produced cultural output, comics promise a more resonant and unadulterated link between creator and reader.

When the connection works, the reading experience can be deeply satisfying. Consider the excerpt here from Alison Bechdel’s “Fun Home.” Even if you’re not too familiar with comics, you may know of Bechdel. In a watershed moment for the entire field, this graphic-novel autobiography was chosen as the best book of 2006 by Time magazine. As stories go, there’s little unusual about “Fun Home”: it’s about a lonely girl in a small town, trying to come to terms with secrets her family kept by, in part, learning to write and draw. But it’s wonderfully executed. With terse prose and fluid shifts in scale and perspective, Bechdel puts adolescence in its pure form right on the page — the jagged feelings of inadequacy, the growing sense of distance from others, the slow realization that life is difficult and thorny and that you have to figure out some way to help yourself because nobody else is going to. Bechdel conveys all this without ever seeming maudlin or self-pitying. She’s also really funny.

More here.

Mark Fenn looks at a Thai worker-owned cooperative brothel, in the Asia Sentinel:

When the words “bar” and “sex” are put together in Thailand, one doesn’t usually think about progressive labor relations or stuff like profit sharing. But in at least one small corner of the country’s huge sex industry, a few women are trying to get a better deal for themselves out of giving pleasure for money.

At the small Can Do bar in the northern city of Chiang Mai, sex workers are using their brains as well as their bodies in an experiment aimed at tackling exploitation. The bar is owned and managed by a collective of women from the Empower Foundation, a support group for sex workers known for its “sex positive” stance on prostitution.

The country’s first so called experitainment bar aims to provide working girls with a safe and fair working environment.

The bar, which complies fully with Thai labor laws, has just celebrated its first birthday and is proving successful on both “a political and an economic level,” said Liz Hilton, who works with Empower. The bar has won acceptance, Hilton says, for providing decent working conditions for the women who work there.

Phil Berardelli in ScienceNOW Daily News:

Even though orbiters have eyed it from space and landers have rumbled across its surface, Mars still has more secrets to reveal. Two findings emerged this week: the possibility of a n active glacier far from the planet’s poles and evidence that sulfur–not carbon–was the element driving the planet’s warmer climate long ago. Both discoveries could force some rethinking about martian evolution and dynamics–and maybe even provide insights about Earth’s past.

The glacier discovery was announced Wednesday by the European Space Agency (ESA). A high-resolution stereo camera aboard ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft spotted the feature in a region called Deuteronilus Mensae, located in the mid-north latitudes of the planet. The Mars Express science team drew the preliminary conclusion that the material in the feature is water ice and that it accumulated as recently as 10,000 years ago, probably from an underground source. Other deposits of water ice have been mapped at the martian poles, but they’re much bigger and are millions of years old. The find is a surprise because the prevailing view is that any water reaching the martian surface from underground quickly evaporates and eventually drifts into space. Yet all of the physical characteristics of the feature are “consistent with that of a glacier,” says geologist and team member Ronald Greeley of Arizona State University in Tempe.

Oover at Project Syndicate (via Political Theory Daily Review):

Critics of the Stern Review don’t think serious action to limit CO2 emissions is justified, because there remains substantial uncertainty about the extent of the costs of global climate change, and because these costs will be incurred far in the future. However, I believe that Stern’s fundamental conclusion is justified: we are much better off reducing CO2 emissions substantially than risking the consequences of failing to act, even if, unlike Stern, one heavily discounts uncertainty and the future.

Two factors differentiate global climate change from other environmental problems. First, whereas most environmental insults – for example, water pollution, acid rain, or sulfur dioxide emissions – are mitigated promptly or in fairly short order when the source is cleaned up, emissions of CO2 and other trace gases remain in the atmosphere for centuries. So reducing emissions today is very valuable to humanity in the distant future.

Second, the externality is truly global in scale, because greenhouse gases travel around the world in a few days. As a result, the nation-state and its subsidiaries, the typical loci for internalizing externalities, are limited in their remedial capacity. (However, since the United States contributes about 25% of the world’s CO2 emissions, its own policy could make a large difference.)

Thus, global climate change is a public good (bad) par excellence.