Via Al Jazeera, Lewis Lapham's introductory essay for “Magic Shows,” the Summer 2012 issue of Lapham's Quarterly:

As between the natural and the supernatural, I've never been much good at drawing firm distinctions. I know myself to be orbiting the sun at the speed of 65,000 miles per hour, but I can't shake free of the impression shared by Pope Urban VIII, who in 1633 informed Galileo that the earth doesn't move. So also the desk over which I bend to write, seemingly a solid mass of wood – but in point of fact a restless flux of atoms bubbling in a cauldron equivalent to the one attended by the witches in Macbeth.

Nor do I separate the reality from the virtual reality when conversing with the airy spirits in a mobile phone, or while gazing into the wizard's mirror of a television screen. What once was sorcery maybe now is science, but the wonders technological of which I find myself in full possession, among them indoor plumbing and electric light, I incline to regard as demonstrations magical.

This inclination apparently is what constitutes a proof of being human, a faculty like the possession of language that distinguishes man from insect, guinea hen and ape. In the beginning was the word, and with it the powers of enchantment. I take my cue from Christopher Marlowe's tragical drama Doctor Faustus because his dreams of “profit and delight/Of power, of honour, of omnipotence”, are the stuff that America is made of, as was both the consequence to be expected and the consummation devoutly to be wished when America was formed in the alembic of the Elizabethan imagination. Marlowe was present at the creation, as were William Shakespeare, the navigators Martin Frobisher and Francis Drake and the Lord Chancellor Francis Bacon, envisioning a utopian New Atlantis on the coast of Virginia…

From Chapati Mystery:

The age of oil has produced unprecedented scales of human confinement and brutality. At the same time, people are traveling faster, and in larger groups than ever before: migration to the Gulf following the oil boom of the 1970s is a case in point. There are currently some fifteen million migrant workers in the Gulf, hailing mostly from Asian, African, and Arab countries. The number of South Asian migrant laborers rose substantially in the 1990s, filling in for the displacements of Arab workers caused by the 1991 Gulf War. There are two and a half million migrant workers from Kerala alone, who annually send home sums amounting to 15% of total remittances to India. Migrant workers spend years away from their families, work for extremely low wages, subsist in poor living conditions, and have their passports held by employers in places with virtually no enforceable labor laws. Their experiences have yet to be voiced within literature in as gripping an account as Benyamin’s novel Goat Days, forthcoming in English. Based on a true story, the novel has become a bestseller in the original Malayalam (Aadujivitam), winning the Kerala Sahitya Academy award. Benyamin, Benny Daniel’s pen name, is a Keralite who has lived in Bahrain since 1992.

There is a tremendous dearth of literature which un-cover the cultures born out of oil encounters. And, although migration to the Gulf constitutes the exemplary South Asian diaspora of our times, no other novel—none available in English, that is—has cast the migrant Gulf worker as its principal character. Benyamin does so by weaving rich descriptions of the protagonist’s surroundings with a robust interior monologue. The narrator is Najeeb, a modest sand-miner from Kerala who travels to Riyadh via Bombay in the 1990s with the dream of earning his fortunes, only to become enslaved for over three years in the desert interior of Saudi Arabia on a goat farm (masara) at the mercy of a cruel boss (arbab). It is a novel of multiple crossings: from South India to the Gulf, from Riyadh to rural Saudi Arabia, and from dreams of economic betterment to impoverished disillusionment. But at the heart of Goat Days is the journey Najeeb makes from slavery to freedom, including a perilous desert trek. The novel is about the many dangers Najeeb faces in his struggle for emancipation.

More here.

Jane Brody in The New York Times:

My recent column on optimism drew hundreds of comments from readers who testified to the value of living life as a glass half full. But one in particular — from a 90-year-old man living in Calabasas, Calif. — was especially telling. The reader, William Richmond, wrote that a phrase in the column, “Fake it until you make it,” summed up his long and very successful life.

His approach to life could serve as a battle plan for the millions of recent college graduates now searching for work in an unforgiving job market, as well as for older adults trying to re-enter the workplace after a long hiatus and those who lost jobs and must now reinvent themselves. In 1946, after serving nearly four years as a fighter pilot in the Marine Corps, Mr. Richmond said he returned to civilian life “certain I could conquer anything I went after.” After all, he’d managed to fly solo and safely land a Piper Cub after just six hours of training, then spent the next year learning to be a pilot. “Do it, then learn how — I guess if it’s good enough for the Marines…,” he wrote. Mr. Richmond loved jazz and, having been handed a drum to play in his middle school band in Rockford, Ill., he decided to go to Los Angeles to become a professional musician. “I wasn’t very good, but I could keep pretty good time and could look like I knew what I was doing,” he wrote. “In a few months I actually got a job in a downtown bar and in due time was playing in a big band.” But recognizing his musical limitations, he then enrolled in a music college to learn how to be a professional drummer, after which he worked almost nonstop for 15 years in big-name bands, playing for singers like Peggy Lee, Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra — and finally for Jerry Lewis. Noting Mr. Richmond’s ability to make people laugh, Mr. Lewis asked him up to write jokes, then a movie, “The Ladies Man” (1961), which was a success even though his collaborator, Mel Brooks, quit early on, leaving Mr. Richmond, a complete novice, to write it. After taking a class in screenwriting, Mr. Richmond wrote six more movies for Mr. Lewis, and followed that with 30 years as a professional comedy writer on countless TV shows before retiring at age 73. “The important thing,” Mr. Richmond said in an interview, “is to visualize what you want and go after it. Be ready for an opening — serendipity — all the time.”

More here.

Rite of Spring

So winter closed its fist
And got it stuck in the pump.
The plunger froze up a lump

In its throat, ice founding itself
Upon iron. The handle
Paralysed at an angle.

Then the twisting of wheat straw
into ropes, lapping them tight
Round stem and snout, then a light

That sent the pump up in a flame
It cooled, we lifted her latch,
Her entrance was wet, and she came.

by Seamus Heaney

From Mondoweiss:

If an interdependent empowerment is our goal, we need to seriously ask ourselves whether that goal can be reached with a Jewish state or if such a state permanently impedes that possibility. Today Israel and Jews in general are further away from an interdependent empowerment than at any time in the post-Holocaust era. Moreover, without a deep and material Jewish solidarity with a Palestinian future there is little chance for a collective or even individual ethical life as Jews.

Yitzhak Shamir should be remembered for impeding a Jewish ethical future. The first Palestinian intifada, which Shamir ordered crushed, may have represented the last chance for reaching across the Israel/Palestinian divide. Or was it the very formation of the state of Israel which Shamir helped birth?

More here.

You wore the letter from T.S. Eliot next to your heart. His praise of In Dreams. Would that you could have stopped that wedding.* No good will come of this!!! You were right. You begged us—Please don’t let them bury me next to my mother. Have a party to celebrate moving from this world hopefully to a better one. And you Lou—I swear—and you know if anyone could I could—you Lou must never write for money or I will haunt you. I’d given him a short story. He gave me a B. I was so hurt and ashamed. Why haunt talentless me? I was the walker for “The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me.” To literary cocktails. He hated them. And I was put in charge. Some drinks later—his shirt undone—one tail front right hanging—tie skewed, fly unzipped. O Delmore. You were so beautiful. Named for a silent movie star dancer Frank Delmore. O Delmore—the scar from dueling with Nietzsche.

more from Lou Reed at Poetry here.

Alain Badiou is the latest in the line of French philosophy professors who have had global greatness thrust upon them: 25 of his books have appeared in English since 1999, along with dozens of works of eulogy and exposition. Badiou, now in his seventies, still hankers for “the truth of May ’68,” and refers to himself, in a rare flash of humour, as “the last communist.” But in one respect at least, he defies the stereotype: he is a Mr Valiant-for-Truth, a believer in invariant eternal verities, and a born-again Platonist, committed to philosophy as “the discipline of the concept,” and mathematics as the revelation of reality. He is thus an implacable opponent of all the language-obsessed relativisms which, in his opinion, have sapped the vigour of the west from the pre-Socratics to the present. If all this has passed you by, you may be tempted by the latest outing for Badiou in English: a collection of essays and reviews from the past 40 years, surveying French philosophy since the salad days of Sartre (The Adventure of French Philosophy, Verso). But Badiou’s reverence for philosophy as a “universal aim of reason” may keep getting in your way. Back in the 1970s he denounced the whole spectrum of French philosophers—from “anarcho-desirers” at one end to renegade left-opportunists at the other—as “charlatans” and “bourgeois impostors,” and age has not cooled his vehemence: throughout this book he is to be observed dissing his colleagues from a very great height.

more from Jonathan Rée at Prospect Magazine here.

Library music (sometimes referred to as “production music” or “stock music”) generally refers to music that has been composed and recorded for commercial purposes and which is licensed not through the composer but the library for which it has been recorded. This means it is much easier and cheaper to use in a movie or TV show than a hit song, which requires copyright clearance from the songwriter and record label, and, in some cases, separate clearances depending on the countries in which the work will be screened. Library music cuts out the middleman, but it also means that most of it can be licensed to any number of projects, so occasionally while scanning through the Killer Tracks archives I’d get this uncanny “Where have I heard that before?” twinge, until I realized it was from, say, a local furniture commercial, or maybe the corporate-diversity video my colleagues and I sat through last week. For anyone who keeps up with pop culture, browsing through certain corners of the Killer Tracks catalog is like traipsing through a bizarre shadow world full of easily identifiable doppelgängers.

more from Lindsay Zoladz at The Believer here.

Joe Biel. Veil. (Work in Progress) – section of 12 foot wide wall.

And further detail:

“Leah Ollman wrote in the Los Angeles Times about Joe Biel’s panoramic drawing of 1,124 tiny (from a thumbnail to a postage stamp) televisions — each TV set with a meticulously rendered image on-screen. The drawing stretches 12 feet across the wall. Drawn from the artist’s collection of more than 5,000 images, the range of subjects span from a glimpse of Elvis to a Velázquez portrait — from Stalin to Dorothy’s ruby slippers. The banal and generic images are deliberately mixed with the iconic and personally significant.”

Morte here and here.

Rob Cooper in the Daily Mail:

Peter Higgs, the Edinburgh University emeritus professor of physics that the particle is named after, is among those who have been called to the press conference in Switzerland.

The management at Cern want the two teams of scientists to reach the 'five sigma' level of certainty with their results – so they are 99.99995 per cent sure – such is the significance of the results.

Tom Kibble, 79, the emeritus professor of physics at Imperial College London, has also been invited but is unable to attend.

He told the Sunday Times: 'My guess is that is must be a pretty positive result for them to be asking us out there.'

The Higgs boson is regarded as the key to understanding the universe. Physicists say its job is to give the particles that make up atoms their mass.

Without this mass, these particles would zip though the cosmos at the speed of light, unable to bind together to form the atoms that make up everything in the universe, from planets to people.

The collider, housed in an 18-mile tunnel buried deep underground near the French-Swiss border, smashes beams of protons – sub-atomic particles – together at close to the speed of light, recreating the conditions that existed a fraction of a second after the Big Bang.

If the physicists’ theory is correct, a few Higgs bosons should be created in every trillion collisions, before rapidly decaying.

More here. More about the Higgs here, here, and here.

Samira Shackle in New Statesman – read it to believe it:

So a rather unusual beauty pageant in Israel this week has caused some controversy. Fourteen women, aged between 74 and 97, competed for the title of “Miss Holocaust Survivor”. Whittled down from 300 entrants, each of the women had survived the horrors of World War II.

Certainly, it jars to think of judging ageing women who have endured so much on the basis of their appearance. Critics said that the contest was macabre and offensive, while the cosmetics company recruited to dress the women for the pageant was accused of using the survivors for a cheap marketing stunt. Pageant organisers Shimon Sabag responded that it was a “celebration of life” and that just ten per cent depended on appearance, with women being judged also on their stories of survival and their contribution to their local communities.

More here.

A Rebuttal to Foreign Policy's Failed States Index for 2012:

We at Africa is a Country think Foreign Policy and the Fund for Peace should either radically rethink the Failed States Index, which they publish in collaboration each year, or abandon it altogether. We just can't take it seriously: It's a failed index.

This year, pro forma, almost the entire African continent shows up on the Failed States map in the guiltiest shade of red. The accusation is that with a handful of exceptions, African states are failing in 2012. But what does this tell us? What does it actually mean? Frankly, we have no idea. The index is so flawed in its conception, so incoherent in its structuring criteria, and so misleading in its presentation that from the perspective of those who live or work in those places condemned as failures, it's difficult to receive the ranking as anything more than a predictable annual canard issued from Washington, D.C. against non-Western — and particularly African — nations.

…The golden principle by which this muddle is to be marshaled oh-so-objectively into a grand spectrum of state failure coefficients is apparently the idea of “stability.” But is it really? Well, if you're an Arab Spring country, then yes, it's the “instability” of revolution or popular revolt that has put you in the red this year. Sorry about that. But if you're North Korea (the paradigmatic failed state in the U.S. imagination — hence why Zimbabwe is often branded “Africa's North Korea”), it's because you're far too stable. If stability is the key to all this, and yet there's an imperative for places like North Korea still to be ranked as failures, then we're in trouble. The cart has long ago overtaken the horse. It would be very difficult indeed to conceive of a more stable form of rule than having power descend smoothly down three generations of the same family over six decades and more (perhaps the Bushes will pull off something like this one day).

Read the rest here.

From New Statesman:

Around 1908, Henry James wrote to a young man he knew: “You have made friends with Edith Wharton. I congratulate you. You may find her difficult, but you will never find her stupid and you will never find her mean.” This quotation appears in most Wharton biographies and many of James and now returns in this volume of letters edited by Irene Goldman-Price. (Goldman-Price somewhat surprisingly chooses to quote from Percy Lubbock’s ­version of the letter in his Portrait of Edith Wharton (1947), which changes the final clause to: “You will find nothing stupid in her and nothing small” – Lubbock was presumably quoting from memory.) Readers interested in Wharton’s very interesting life do not lack for opportunities to learn about her: she wrote an autobiography, A Backward Glance, in 1934; she has been the subject of three major biographies in the past 40 years; and a selection of her voluminous correspondence appeared in 1989. Wharton led an increasingly public existence as the grande dame of American letters in the first half of the 20th century but documentation of her early years has been patchy. To a great extent, biographers have had to rely on A Backward Glance, in which she describes growing up in the “old New York” of the 1870s and 1880s.

Then, in 2009, an unexpected treasure trove appeared at auction: Anna Catherine Bahl­mann, who became Wharton’s governess in 1874 and was her companion and secretary until Bahlmann’s death in 1916, had kept all 135 of Wharton’s letters to her over 40 years. No one else knew of the letters’ existence and the archive is of real significance to Wharton scholarship. The majority of the Bahlmann correspondence was written before 1900, the year that Wharton’s first novel was published.

More here.

From The Guardian:

During the first half of the 20th century, millions of Muslim women decided to abandon the head coverings their mothers had used; in the second half of the century, millions of Muslim women resumed wearing the veil. How and why these fluctuations of personal habit affected so many across the Muslim world is the question Leila Ahmed sets herself. She focuses on Egypt, which was a key influence in both the unveiling and the veiling, to trace the many meanings which this piece of cloth has acquired. It's an acute study of how issues of political power and empire interact with women's own claims to autonomy within families and communities. Ahmed beds her analysis into the wider political currents of Egypt without ever losing sight of women's own interpretations of what they were doing and why.

What adds force to the analysis is the sense that the book has been a journey of personal discovery for Ahmed, a Harvard academic. She grew up in Cairo in the 1940s, and was raised by a generation of women who never wore the veil; she absorbed from them the assumption that the veil was backward, a restriction of female autonomy. Like many Muslim women of her generation, the veil's reappearance has been shocking, unexpected and regarded as a step backwards. Writing the book has forced her to reassess such assumptions, and come to a new, more positive understanding of the veil.

More here.