Getting Married

The man from Egypt was caught
whispering behind a hedge
with this woman from Canaan.

the father walked away before they saw him
went to his weapons room
then flew back to the hedge, enraged

but composed. The man, legs tied
by Guilt, the woman, eyes unbelieving the sight,
could run nowhere, could not pretend even.

The rule:
you are caught by the father whispering,
your man takes you home, arranges a messenger,
pays bride price, and you are normalized.

After that, whisper all you want, in hedges or vast sky
no father brandishes axe in your face:
that's life in Egypt and Canaan
distinct and interesting sections
of Highfield, Harare.

by Emmanuel Sigauke

Morgan Meis on Robert Hughes, in The Smart Set:

Robert Hughes was macho. It is hard to point to any one thing that proves this assertion. He was just macho. He knew how to project authority and swagger. He would say tough guy things like, “What strip mining is to nature the art market has become to culture.” That is the primary reason he was always being compared to Clement Greenberg. Greenberg had that macho swagger too. Maybe it was the macho that allowed both Greenberg and Hughes to make such bold judgments about art, to proclaim what is good and what is bad. The macho was the antidote to the fear. It is inherently scary to be exposed to your fellow human being and Hughes, like Greenberg before him, exposed himself again and again. Before his death last week, Hughes had been the art critic for Time Magazine for three decades. He is one of the few individuals of this era whose opinions on art were actually being read and considered by millions of people. The macho was a tool, a weapon in his arsenal. In this, he had learned a lot from reading Clement Greenberg.

For all the stylistic similarities between Hughes and Greenberg, Hughes was never (unlike, say, Michael Fried) a true Greenbergian. In an essay for the New York Review of Books in 1993, Hughes argued that, “There is little doubt that Greenberg’s version of modernism has had its day. Not only because of the victories of what he dismissed as 'novelty art'—Pop, Minimalism, and mediabased imagery of all kinds; but, more importantly, because of the limitations of his positivist world view, based on a truculent materialism.” Hughes' critique of Greenberg was neither unique nor novel. Many artists and critics have come to realize that Greenberg's “formalism” was defined too narrowly, thus allowing contemporary art very little room to grow. But Hughes' essay from 1993 is notable in how directly he ties this critique of Greenberg into an analysis of Greenberg's youthful Marxism and its latent influence on his underlying conception of history. Hughes put it like this: “The experience of Marxism gave Greenberg his bent as a critic: an obsession with the direction of history.”

James Livingston makes the case over at Politics and Letters (image from Wikimedia Commons):

In the history of drama, and that includes melodrama, there’s a difference between the Fool and the Charlatan. The Fool is motivated and animated by irony doubled unto absurdity. He’s typically empowered by the King, or by the local authorities, as diversion from the real action, as comic relief—as the man whose utterance won’t make sense to the actors on stage until the play is concluded and just about everybody is dead.

The audience is differently empowered, because it’s always in on the joke of the Fool’s mistaken identity—we get the disguise, the dissembling., from the very beginning of his act. We know this Fool is not the man he pretends to be, and, more significantly, we know him as our informant on stage, on screen, in the space where we can be only spectators, and he plays this role for us no matter how devoted he is to the cause of the King or the local authorities. So he turns irony and absurdity into information for the audience long before the dramatic action is over.

The Charlatan is the figure who is merely absurd, or simply evil, because he skips the stage of irony—because, unlike the Fool, he doesn’t know that the power to which he’s indentured himself, and this includes the effect of his own utterance, is itself divisible. The difference I’m trying to describe here is the difference between Edgar and Edmund in “King Lear.” The audience knows the Charlatan lacks either conviction or evidence, and he may know this as well, but, unlike the Fool, he doesn’t care: he’s the pawn who would be king. Like Hamlet, who only plays the Fool, Iago is either the exception to or the epitome of these rules (and that’s why these two remain the formative characters of modern literature and 20^th-century film).

Niall Ferguson is a Charlatan in these terms.

Michael Wood in The Nation:

Philip Larkin is known and admired for his “poetry of lowered sights and patiently diminished expectations”—these words are Donald Davie’s—but his best work is often both narrower and more troubling than these terms suggest, as it concerns something like the unpronounceable loss of what we were never going to have, or a complicated refusal of what was not quite on offer. The logic of the wonderful “Poetry of Departures,” for example, suggests that any tale of escape from drab reality will be both overblown and alluring, because “We all hate home/And having to be there.” So why not leave: because the tales are phony? They are, but that is not the real obstacle. No, the tales themselves help us to “stay/Sober and industrious”; more subtly, escape itself is all about home and what’s wrong with it, a reverse framing of what we can’t leave. There isn’t anywhere else. “But I’d go today,” the poem ends,

Yes, swagger the nut-strewn roads,
Crouch in the fo’c’sle
Stubbly with goodness, if
It weren’t so artificial,
Such a deliberate step backwards
To create an object:
Books; china; a life
Reprehensibly perfect.

“Reprehensibly perfect” is itself perfect, a miming of criticism that is also a form of self-congratulation. So too are those careful, mock-hesitant line breaks at “if” and “a life.” Behind the poem we intuit a Philip Larkin who has just these feelings, or at least wouldn’t disavow them, and another Larkin who is broaching them, performing them, fully aware of the poem’s crisscrossing insights and illusions, watching the man who is so anxious not to be fooled caught in the business of fooling himself.

Sady Doyle in In These Times:

In the wake of Helen Gurley Brown’s death last week, there have been endless evaluations of her feminism. Was she a bold predecessor of third-wave sex-positivity, whose 1962 book Sex and the Single Girl established the possibility of a sexually and financially emancipated lifestyle for women? Was she a throwback who told women that sexual harassment was fun and games, plastic surgery was a must-have, and “feminism” was just another word for being a drag? Both views have passionate adherents. But the fact is, Gurley Brown was neither. She was just one of the world’s great advertisers.

To get a sense of Gurley Brown’s legacy, it might help to take a look at her baby, Cosmopolitan magazine, which she took over and revamped in 1965 after 17 years as an advertising executive. The front page of Cosmopolitan’s website, for example, has a quiz—“Are You a Good Flirt?”—wherein one can earn a rating anywhere from “Ketchup” to “Tabasco: You leave every man’s tongue burning.” Which sounds like a medical condition, actually, but is apparently good. You can also learn to “Read His Beach Body Language,” learn how to “Wow Him Every Time” or discover “30 Things To Do To A Naked Man.” (Not to spoil this for you, but I’m going to bet that at least 29 of those things are “have sex with him.”) And if you “Want a Better Boyfriend”—though one hopes you already have a good one, considering the amount of time you apparently spend reading about him—you can get him a subscription to CFG: Cosmo For Guys, where he too can learn sex tips such as “get naked too.” (I’m serious.)

You can already probably see the problems with this particular feminist legacy: It’s concentrated almost entirely on men and how to please them. There are a few feints at sexual equality—you could learn some “Steamy Ways To Turn You On” after you’re done flipping through the naked-guy manual—but for the most part, getting a boyfriend and giving him adequate orgasms are presented as both a woman’s main goals in life and her ultimate reward.

Justin E. H. Smith and Danielle S. Allen in Cabinet:

What are the differences in the ways different societies conceptualize punishment? What are the differences in the ways they enact it? And what can be learned by looking at other systems of punishment about the contingency and potential for transformation of our own system? Ancient Athens has often served as a model for certain of the modern world’s deepest aspirations in democratic government and philosophical rationality. At least since Nietzsche, it has also sometimes been approached as an extremely foreign land, whose values and practices, in their strangeness, can at the same time show just how strange our own are. How, now, does Athens look when we turn our attention to its conceptualization and enactment of punishment?

Danielle S. Allen is a political theorist who has addressed these questions in her work on both ancient Athens and modern America. Author of The World of Prometheus: The Politics of Punishing in Democratic Athens (Princeton University Press, 2000), Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education (University of Chicago Press, 2004), and Why Plato Wrote (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), Allen is UPS Foundation Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Justin E. H. Smith spoke to Allen by phone about the relationship between justice, punishment, and citizenship.

Read the interview here.

Sebastian Anthony in Extreme Tech:

Scientists have been eyeing up DNA as a potential storage medium for a long time, for three very good reasons: It’s incredibly dense (you can store one bit per base, and a base is only a few atoms large); it’s volumetric (beaker) rather than planar (hard disk); and it’s incredibly stable — where other bleeding-edge storage mediums need to be kept in sub-zero vacuums, DNA can survive for hundreds of thousands of years in a box in your garage.

It is only with recent advances in microfluidics and labs-on-a-chip that synthesizing and sequencing DNA has become an everyday task, though. While it took years for the original Human Genome Project to analyze a single human genome (some 3 billion DNA base pairs), modern lab equipment with microfluidic chips can do it in hours. Now this isn’t to say that Church and Kosuri’s DNA storage is fast — but it’s fast enough for very-long-term archival.

More here.

H. M. Naqvi in India Today:

Unlike Lahore or Islamabad, Karachi is not pretty. It's a rough and tumble megalopolis like Sao Paulo, like Mumbai, that features a hardy, dynamic populace. Karachiwallahs make Karachi Karachi. The city is populated by thugs and humanitarians, businessmen and novelists. No other city in Pakistan (or say, Austria for that matter) could sustain something like the Karachi Literature Festival. No other city can boast weekly qawwalis and mushairas as well as art exhibitions and plays. Karachi has changed dramatically in three centuries and will continue changing at the same pace. Whether it will change for the better or worse is a matter best left to punters and political pundits. I need qawwali, a plate of nihari and the energy of a megalopolis.

Like my grandfather, I might not own any real estate in the city (or, for the record, anywhere else), but I have carved a life for myself here. As a storyteller, Karachi fascinates. There's a story under every stone.

More here.

Fromm The Telegraph:

From The New York Times:

Alexander Kumar, a physician and researcher at Concordia Station, writes from Antarctica, where he conducts scientific experiments for the European Space Agency’s human spaceflight program.

Wednesday, Aug. 15

After three months of dreaming about the sun, I awoke early Sunday morning with a glow outside my window. I clambered out onto the roof and closed the hatch below me. The horizon beamed with light — the sun was bursting and breaking from the constraints of the long, dark, cold and lonely Antarctic winter. Change was afoot. I had programmed my iPod to play “Here Comes the Sun” by the Beatles. Disappointingly, in minus 100 degrees Fahrenheit, its batteries died from the cold before the end of the song — another consideration for future Mars missions, should they wish to listen to David Bowie’s “Life on Mars” as they build red sand castles, live and survive on the Red Planet. The most magnificent sunrise unfolded before me over the ice. It felt as if we had been frozen into the sea ice, the 360-degree panorama revealing what appeared to be a flat, frozen ocean in all directions.

More here.

Frame, an Epistle

Sughra Raza. Morning errands in Purana Sheher, Lahore. 2010.

Digital photograph.

A highly ideological, jingoistic clique masquerades as objective scholars, all to justify US militarism.

Glenn Greenwald's last column for Salon before he moves to The Guardian:

There is no term more potent in our political discourse and legal landscape than “Terrorism.” It shuts down every rational thought process and political debate the minute it is uttered. It justifies torture (we have to get information from the Terrorists); due-process-free-assassinations even of our own citizens (Obama has to kill the Terrorists); and rampant secrecy (the Government can’t disclose what it’s doing or have courts rule on its legality because the Terrorists will learn of it), and it sends people to prison for decades (material supporters of Terrorism).

It is a telling paradox indeed that this central, all-justifying word is simultaneously the most meaningless and therefore the most manipulated. It is, as I have noted before, a word that simultaneously means nothing yet justifies everything. Indeed, that’s the point: it is such a useful concept precisely because it’s so malleable, because it means whatever those with power to shape discourse want it to mean. And no faction has helped this process along as much as the group of self-proclaimed “terrorism experts” that has attached itself to think tanks, academia, and media outlets. They enable pure political propaganda to masquerade as objective fact, shining brightly with the veneer of scholarly rigor. The industry itself is a fraud, as are those who profit from and within it.

More here. [Thanks to Kris Kotarski.]