Toni Morrison on love, loss and modernity

From The Telegraph:

Toni-1-reuters_2272684bMorrison has written 10 novels and won a multitude of highly respected awards.Her best-seller Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize and was voted by The New York Times the best work of American fiction in the past 25 years. Her 1977 novel Song of Solomon won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970, when she was 39 years old and at the time, working at Random House as an editor. Because her literary success came later in life, when did she begin to trust her instincts – was it immediate? “Oh, I trust something else,” she says, thinking it through. “Which is the intelligence to examine my instincts.”

…Morrison has spoken in the past about her resistance to explaining black life to a white audience. What did she mean by that? “In American literature, African American male writers justifiably write books about their oppression,” she says. “Confronting the oppressor who is white male or white woman. It’s race. And the person who defines you under those circumstances is a white mind – tells you whether you’re worthy or what have you. And as long as that’s your preoccupation, you’re defending yourself against that. Reacting to it. Reacting to the definition – saying it’s not true. African American women never do that. They never write about white men. I couldn’t care less – I didn’t want to spend my energy refuting that gaze.”

More here.

A Bone Here, a Bead There: On the Trail of Human Origins

John Noble Wilford in The New York Times:

Video-stringer-articleLargeWho are we, and where did we come from? Scientists studying the origin of modern humans, Homo sapiens, keep reaching deeper in time to answer those questions — toward the last common ancestor of great apes and humans, then forward to the emergence of people more and more like us in body and behavior. Their research is advancing on three fronts. Fossils of skulls and bones expose anatomical changes. Genetics reveals the timing and place of the Eve of modern humans. And archaeology turns up ancient artifacts reflecting abstract and creative thought, and a growing self-awareness. Just last month, researchers made the startling announcement that Stone Age paintings in Spanish caves were much older than previously thought, from a time when Neanderthals were still alive.

To help make sense of this cascade of new information, a leading authority on modern human evolution — the British paleoanthropologist Chris Stringer — recently sat for an interview in New York that ranged across many recent developments: the evidence of interbreeding between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens; the puzzling extinct species of little people nicknamed the hobbits; and the implications of a girl’s 40,000-year-old pinkie finger found in a Siberian cave.

More here.

Romney is not merely a fatuous, unoriginal hack of a politician, but also a genuinely repugnant human being

Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone:

A16d209fcdade9484b748bac7089e50bb5ba6c3aWow. If you live long enough, you’ll see some truly gross things in politics, but Mitt Romney’s work this past week “courting black support” was enough to turn even the strongest stomach.

Romney really showed us something in his luridly self-congratulating N.A.A.C.P. gambit, followed by the awesomely disgusting “free stuff” post-mortem speech he delivered the next night in front of friendlier audiences. The twin appearances revealed the candidate to be not merely unlikable, and not merely a fatuous, unoriginal hack of a politician, but also a genuinely repugnant human being, a grasping corporate hypocrite with so little feel for how to get along with people that he has to dream up elaborate schemes just to try to pander to the mob.

At first, it was hard to say what exactly Romney was thinking when he decided to address the N.A.A.C.P. He plunged into the speech with a creepy kamikaze smile and a rushed, weird (even for him) delivery, acting like someone proud of what a ballsily moronic dare he was attempting – like a high school kid mooning a squad car from the back of a school bus, or Peter McNeeley rushing face-first into the ring with Mike Tyson.

More here.

The Id, The Ego, And The Superhero: What Makes Batman Tick?

Linda Holmes on psychologist Robin Rosenberg's new book, from NPR's Weekend Edition:

BatmanPerhaps the problem, she suggests, doesn't lie in the gifted Bruce Wayne, but in the people who assume something has to be wrong with him in the first place. Perhaps we're just not accustomed to his kind of self-sacrifice. “People who are truly selfless,” she says, “who have given so much of themselves, are confusing to most of us. And I think some of us, in cynical moments, say, 'There must be something the matter with someone who would do that.'”

She argues that our confusion at why Bruce Wayne would throw himself in the path of all manner of catastrophes misses the point that there's something in it for him, too. “I think it misses that it's about getting a whole life,” she says. “He experienced something that is terrifying as a kid, but his decision to become Batman gave his life meaning and purpose. It found a silver lining in tragedy.” And perhaps there's something in it for the rest of us: “The idea of superheroes that we carry around in our heads may help us to actually do good in our own lives.”

More here.

Meet Dr Love

Oliver Burkeman at The Guardian talks to Paul Zak, an expert on oxytocin, aka 'the moral molecule':

Paul ZakThe American academic Paul Zak is renowned among his colleagues for two things that he does to people disconcertingly soon after meeting them. The first is hugging: seeing me approach across the library of his club, in midtown Manhattan, New York, he springs to his feet, ignoring my outstretched hand, and enfolds me in his arms. The second is sticking needles in their arms to draw blood.

…What drives Zak's hunger for human blood is his interest in the hormone oxytocin, about which he has become one of the world's most prominent experts. Long known as a female reproductive hormone – it plays a central role in childbirth and breastfeeding – oxytocin emerges from Zak's research as something much more all-embracing: the “moral molecule” behind all human virtue, trust, affection and love, “a social glue”, as he puts it, “that keeps society together”. The subtitle of his book, “the new science of what makes us good or evil”, gives a sense of the scale of his ambition, which involves nothing less than explaining whole swaths of philosophical and religious questions by reference to a single chemical in the bloodstream. Being treated decently, it turns out, causes people's oxytocin levels to go up, which in turn prompts them to behave more decently, while experimental subjects given an artificial oxytocin boost – by means of an inhaler – behave more generously and trustingly. And it's not solely because of its effects on humans that oxytocin is known as “the cuddle hormone”: for example, male meadow voles, normally roguishly promiscuous in their interactions with female meadow voles, become passionately monogamous when their oxytocin levels are raised in the lab.

Read more here.

No, I’m not free at 11 pm for sex

Sonali K in Open:

10168.sex-columnistBeing a sex columnist is a double-edged sword; you never know which side it’s going to fall on any given day. Some days it turns a conversation into a beautiful relationship, other days it automatically casts you in the role of a one-night-stand. There have been as many bitter epiphanies as exciting moments on this journey.

Being a sex columnist means…

» Getting used to mild cardiac arrests on a daily basis. Like when my little brother grabs my laptop before I’ve cleared my browser history. It also means sackfuls of emails from lecherous men each time a new issue hits the stands. “No, I’m not available for sex at 2300 hours next Saturday, Sir. That’s right, not even if you pay me by the minute.”

» Directing porn films starring friends. How do you stop a hysterical friend from describing her lover’s erectile problem in graphic detail? And how do you look at said paramour in the eye when you meet him at a party two days later?

More here.

monkey problems

ID_PI_GOLBE_MONKE_FT_001

The battle between Delhiites and their monkeys has been going on for some time now. As frustrated Delhiites look for solutions, others are trying to understand the reasons behind the increase in monkeys and monkey chutzpah. Loss of habitat due to the vast expansion of the city is one. What now belongs to the streets once belonged to the monkeys. Others point out that the Hindu citizens of New Delhi have been feeding the monkeys on Tuesdays and Saturdays even as they complain about them on other days of the week. They do this to honor Hanuman, the monkey god and a symbol of strength and devotion. (Ironically, the langurs that have been employed to intimidate Delhi’s monkeys are called “Hanuman langurs.”) Authorities plead with Delhiites and threaten them with fines in the hope that this will curb the wanton public feeding of the monkeys. But it is to no avail. A few years back, food collection centers to regulate monkey feeding were set up near Hanuman temples. The collection boxes remained empty. It was not enough for Hanuman worshipers to know the monkeys would be fed in their honor. For it is the direct relationship between human and monkey that makes the act of worship meaningful. A spokesperson for the Municipal Corporation of Delhi told the Indo-Asian News Service that “religious sentiment” was the campaign’s biggest challenge.

more from Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set here.

It had to be awesome, not just pleasant and slick

Image

When we think of modern architecture, two modes come to mind. The first is the sleek, planar, glass-and-steel style established by Mies Van Der Rohe and his interpreters at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and elsewhere, epitomized by Mies’s Seagram Building (1958). The second is heavy, sculptural steel-reinforced concrete, with much of its artistry in the treatment of the cast concrete surface, most closely associated with the late work of Le Corbusier. The architectural term brutalism is said to have its origins in Corbusier’s use of the phrase béton brut, or “raw concrete,” the brut connoting not brutality or brutishness (although critics would play up that association) but the decision to leave the concrete’s surface rough and unfinished, and often impressed with the wood grain, joints, and other irregularities of the boards with which it was cast. The concept of “the New Brutalism” was brought into being by the critic Reyner Banham’s 1966 book of that name, which highlighted the work of postwar British architects Alison and Peter Smithson.

more from Thomas de Monchaux at n+1 here.

the bookless library

Bookless Library

THEY ARE, in their very different ways, monuments of American civilization. The first is a building: a grand, beautiful Beaux-Arts structure of marble and stone occupying two blocks’ worth of Fifth Avenue in midtown Manhattan. The second is a delicate concoction of metal, plastic, and glass, just four and a half inches long, barely a third of an inch thick, and weighing five ounces. The first is the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, the main branch of the New York Public Library (NYPL). The second is an iPhone. Yet despite their obvious differences, for many people today they serve the same purpose: to read books. And in a development that even just thirty years ago would have seemed like the most absurd science fiction, there are now far more books available, far more quickly, on the iPhone than in the New York Public Library. It has been clear for some time now that this development would pose one of the greatest challenges that modern libraries—from institutions like the NYPL on down—have ever encountered. Put bluntly, one of their core functions now faces the prospect of obsolescence.

more from David A. Bell a TNR here.

Solanaceae: a family portrait

by Rishidev Chaudhuri

Like some eccentric prominent family, whose genius shades easily into the occult, the evil and the mad, Solanaceae, the family of the nightshade (so often prefixed by “deadly”), both contains several of our most ubiquitous food plants (typically of New World origin) and many of the multifarious toxins and deliriants beloved of witches, shamans and poisoners throughout history. The plants of Solanaceae are a dramatic-looking group, full of trumpet-like flowers that open at dusk and branches and stems that curl together like gnarled witches claws. They are also the source of eerie legends and origin myths, as exemplified by mandrake, said to grow from the ejaculate of a hanged man, and whose scream (when pulled out of the ground) will kill everyone in earshot. Mandrake

To anyone who has ever shuddered at or been baffled by the thought that for most of history the Italians have had no tomatoes, the South Asians have had no chillies and no one in the Old World (including the Irish, the Germans and the Russians) has had potatoes, the gifts of Solanaceae are apparent. These are the bounty of the New World, plants that were brought over from the Americas by European explorers, introduced into their home countries and then spread to the rest of the world (many of the sins of the Portuguese colonists should be offset by their introduction of the chilli to India). Traces of this recency exist on the linguistic map, and several cultures label tomatoes and potatoes as some sort of eggplant or apple1.

While the major Solanaceae food crops that we eat are from the New World, most of the family members used in the Old World were used as hallucinogens, medicines (in small doses) or as poisons (with the notable exception of eggplant). Both tomatoes and potatoes suffered from these associations, and it took a while before people became convinced that they were safe to eat. One is generally not responsible for one's relatives (except children), but there is some truth to this fear. The leaves and stems of tomato plants are mildly toxic, and potato sprouts can be quite dangerous (in reTomato flowercent years, much of this has been bred out of the plant varieties that we eat, though the same is probably not true for non-mass-market varieties). Once they broke through to acceptance, though, they spread widely and now both are cultivated widely all over the world. Potatoes in particular were an essential new source of cheap calories for the Industrial Revolution and were declared by Engels to be the equivalent of iron for their historically revolutionary role. They are thought to be responsible for a significant fraction of Old World population growth in the 18th and 19th centuries, with the downside that potato crop failures lead to severe famines.

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Poetry in Translation: A Couplet of Ghalib

by S. Abbas Raza

This post is dedicated to my wife, Margit Oberrauch.

A couple of weeks ago I came upon a Ghalib couplet in Urdu which evoked pangs of recognition in me. Ghalib captures so simply and so well a discomfort that I like to imagine nearly everyone has experienced: that of having to ask a favor from an enemy, a rival, a cruel person, a nemesis, or even the object of one's unrequited love. Reading (or hearing) it one immediately and viscerally and empathetically feels the immensity of Ghalib's effort in overcoming embarrassment and shame, having recognized the necessity of doing it, and this is complicated by other layers of agonizing sentiment generated by the imminent exposure of vulnerability, having to act obsequious, as well as the risk of further public insult if the person refuses to grant the favor. Having to ask for help is bad enough when the person being asked is not someone you hate (or hates you). (It reminded me a bit of Nabokov's Pnin.)

01

It is truly masterful, a fragile gem of a couplet in Urdu, in the sense that not only can it not be improved, changing a single word anywhere destroys it. (Yes, I had the temerity to try.) But when I tried to explain the meaning of the couplet to my wife I found it near-impossible to translate into English in any straightforward way. I hemmed and hawed and went into a ten-minute lecture on what it is about but never managed to say in two decent lines of English what Ghalib has said so easily in Urdu.

Here is my transliteration into Roman Urdu:

Kaam uss say aa paraa hai keh jiss ka jahaan mein

Layvay nah koee naam sitamgar kahay baghair

And finally, here is the best I could do as an English translation, using three lines:

I am obliged to seek help from him

to whom no one in the world refers

without also referring to his cruelty

I invite you, if you speak Urdu, to suggest your own translation.

Poetry in Translation II: Iqbal

by Rafiq Kathwari

HIMALAYA

After Iqbal

O Himalaya, tell of that time when man first lay
in your lap. O let me imagine that dawn
unstained by red. Run backward, circle of
day and night, ancient eras a moment in your lifetime.
You are a poem whose first verse is the sky.
Your bright turbans dazzle the Pleiades.
Lightning across your peaks sends black tents wandering
above the valley. The wind polishes the trembling mirrors
at your hem. Streams cascade down your forehead,
your cheeks quiver. As morning air cradles intoxicated
roses and the leaves are silenced by the rose-gatherer's wrists,
so speech is silenced in the roar of falling water.

Mohammed Iqbal (1877 -1938) one of the two great South Asian poets of the 20th Century (the other was Faiz Ahmed Faiz) advocated ceaseless endeavor, writing with equal ease in Persian, Urdu, and English. He was knighted by the British but is rarely called Sir Mohammed.

Translated from the Urdu by Rafiq Kathwari, guest poet at 3Quarks Daily.

American Sketches

by Haider Shahbaz

(Note: The theme of one sketch was suggested by fellow 3 Quarks Daily columnist Rishidev Chaudhuri after a night of his delicious summer drinks. As always, I am grateful.)

I (Thirty five dollars and seventy two cents)

Once he nailed her to the floor he moved back assuredly. He briskly – yet noiselessly – moved his bulk from the kitchen to the common room. He stepped around the Ikea furniture. He was unfazed by her desperate gaze. She was beating her heels against the shiny hardwood floor. Her arms were stretched straight above her head. The palms of her hands were nailed into the shiny hardwood floor by a Stanley TRE550 Brad Nail Gun. It cost him twenty seven dollars on Amazon. The Stanley SWKBN625 nails cost him two dollars and eight cents. The blood was dripping and congealing. Never was life like this on the shiny hardwood floor. He had taped her mouth using Scotch 920-BLK-C 1.88-inch by 20 yards Duct Tape. The tape cost him four dollars and fifty three cents on Amazon. It had three out of five stars in the customer review section. When he returned from the common room, he was carrying a medium sized deep-blue bucket. The half a gallon of diesel that was sloshing inside the bucket cost him two dollars and twelve cents at Shell. He doused the diesel on her and around the kitchen. He took out matches from the back pocket of his brown khakis. The matches had a deep blue cover with a red stripe across the bottom and a shining diamond: diamond matches. The matches cost him nothing. He lit one, flicked it at her, and walked out. He walked through the neatly pruned garden towards his Prius. The pink house with a rectangular body and a triangular top painted against the taut canvas of a New England sky was slowly burning. He started his car and drove down to highway I-95 drinking Dunkin´ Donuts coffee. He gulped large amounts of air from the open window. He turned his car lights off. The sun was coming out behind the birch trees.

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Monday Poems

Time Loops
.

“I don’t think I ever was a child.”
……………. –Coleman Hawkins, top sax jazzman
Jazzman

I
don’t think
I ever was a child

Was
I a child?
I don’t think—

If
I ever was a child
I’d know. …..I
don’t.

I
don’t even know, jazzman said
if a child ever was

Child,
jazzman said,

I don’t just think
I play jazz man

Halberg's Rooster

Up the road Halberg’s rooster,
descendent of dinosuars,
croaks his 4 syllable hello to the sun

while mighty We
dumb as rooster ancestry
imagine we shall always be

Sad and Serene

Sad’s the man who says
on the day he ends,
I could have done more

Sad’s the man who
on that day says,
How come?

Sad’s the man who says
on the day he ends,
What’s the score?
.
Serene’s the man who
on that day says,
I think it was a worthy run

by Jim Culleny, 2008-2012

Lake Life

by Mara Jebsen

Photo 96

The photograph on the right was taken when I was six, on a boat speeding through Lake Ontario, in Henderson Harbor, New York. It was in the village of Henderson, a good six hours north of New York City, that an ancestor of mine (one more interested in fishing than fashion) built five houses in the early 1900’s; one for each of his children.

Four of the houses are on the water, and one looms on the hill across the road. A lakefront house right in the middle got sold before I was born, and the poor souls that live there now built a high fence around it to keep my family from swarming across their property. We no longer miss that house, but we do still call it by its old name.

Everything about the remaining four is somewhat irregular—they are all in different styles, of different sizes, and each is attached to a different-sized patch of property. The one that belongs to my branch has the least land, and is the biggest and most decrepit. It is best suited to being filled by at least two nuclear families. Probably its best asset is a cobwebby porch built directly over the water.

The lake itself is sea-weedy, green. Zebra mussels cut your feet. The labour of living by it —dragging the boat in, wresting bins of garbage up the stone hill in a wheelbarrow, washing a hundred plates three times a day—is more intense than you expected when you were child. There is always someone watering and pressing the clay court, or hanging up endless clumps of wet bathing suits and towels on lines. There is a mass production of tomato and chicken sandwiches, and by the time the last child has had their lunch, the first child is thinking of his dinner. In one area are bunches of children engaged in archery, over there are some more playing chess. Several grownups are off somewhere, sailing. All activities are tinged with competition, and a little danger. The tennis is downright ferocious.

Everywhere there is evidence of grandeur and decay.

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Religions are failed sciences

Sam Harris at Big Think:

Question: What is religion?

ScreenHunter_09 Jul. 15 23.33Sam Harris: Well I think we are misled by this very term “religion”. We use that word “religion” as though it meant a distinct thing….as though it meant one phenomenon in human discourse. And there’s really a range of infatuations and practices that go by the name of religion. And therefore many points on this continuum don’t have much in common with others. So if you take a religion like “Jainism” – a religion in India – its core principle is non-violence. Now there is where Gandhi got his conception of non-violence. And the Jains are vegetarian. They have no doctrine of holy war. In fact, they don’t even have a doctrine – a proper doctrine of self-defense. I mean they’re pacifists. They don’t want to hurt a fly. And then on the other end of the continuum, you have something like Islam where it has explicitly a doctrine of holy war, and a notion of….Combat and death, in certain contexts, is actually the highest obligation a religious person can fulfill. So these are both religions. And so religion is a word like “sport”. You have a sport like badminton, and you have a sport like, you know, boxing. They’re not….they’re both sports that, you know, one is much more dangerous. So I’m concerned….I’m obviously more concerned about religions like Islam that….wherein you have this marriage of a variety of spiritual and ethical concerns; but also certain kinds of metaphysical certainties that inspire people to not only die, but to kill others in the process. And you don’t have that in other religions. So I think that we have to be clear about how this term religion can mislead us.

More here.

Anatomy of a Successful Rape Joke

Jessica Valenti in The Nation:

Believe it or not, jokes about rape can be funny. (Yes, even feminists think so.) But Daniel Tosh’s hotly debated “joke” aimed at a female heckler was far from humorous—in fact, it was a perfect example of hownot to joke about rape.

Tosh has come under fire this week after a woman blogged about her experience seeing Tosh at a comedy club. According to her, Tosh was talking about how rape jokes were always “hilarious.” She called out, “Actually, rape jokes are never funny!”

After I called out to him, Tosh paused for a moment. Then, he says, “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by like, 5 guys right now? Like right now? What if a bunch of guys just raped her…”

Her post has since gone viral, prompting Tosh to write a tepid apology on his Twitter account:

all the out of context misquotes aside, i’d like to sincerely apologize j.mp/PJ8bNs

— daniel tosh (@danieltosh) July 10, 2012

In the meantime, hordes of fans and other comedians have come to his defense, some in the most violently misogynist way possible.

Elissa Bassist at The Daily Beast gets to the heart of why what Tosh said wasn’t funny—in fact, why it wasn’t a joke at all.

Tosh says he was joking. Comedians make rape jokes every day, so why is this one getting so much attention? Because Tosh was more than “just kidding.” He was angry. His “joke” was reactive to the so-called heckler who called him out in front of an audience. He used humor to cut her down, to remind her of own vulnerability, to emphasize who was in control. The “joke” ignited a backlash because it was not a joke; it was vastly different from other jokes about rape.

Jokes about rape that work—those that subvert rather than terrify—do exist. Sarah Silverman has one about being raped by a doctor: “…so bittersweet for a Jewish girl,” she says.

More here. See also this.

Revenge Insurance: A Few Short Steps to the Gallows

Terrance Tomkow in his own excellent blog:

You are travelling to a lawless Stuckerman 24692 third world country to do good works. You make preparation for your journey: You get the appropriate shots. You increase your health insurance in case the shots don't work. To protect the family you are leaving behind, you increase your life insurance and add a double indemnity clause.

Friends advise you to arm yourself, but you are not comfortable with guns. Instead, you visit the office of a private security agency (“The Agency”) to investigate the possibility of hiring bodyguards. The Agency's sales rep explains to you that because of the prevalence of violence and the total absence of law in this country the demand for private security there is high and so the service is very expensive. Looking at their rate sheet you realize it is far more costly than you can afford. As you rise to leave, the sympathetic rep offers you a brochure for one of The Agency's other services. They call it “Revenge Insurance”.

The brochure explains that Revenge Insurance does not provide any protection to its policy holders. However, in the event that a subscriber is the victim of wrongful injury while in-country, the agency will undertake to use its considerable resources to track down the wrongdoer. When they find him, The Agency's operatives will not try to have the wrongdoer pay the policy holder compensation or recover stolen goods. That is a separate service and, given the general poverty in the country, rarely worth the cost. But, if you have Revenge Insurance, what the agency will do to the bad guy who injured you is hurt him.

Question: Is it morally permissible for you to buy Revenge Insurance?

More here.