APPETITES
For Ravi Shankar
He will bring you croissants in bed
Come to you as clouds
Gradually discover the moon
Unstring you knot by knot
Feast with you on the roof
Weave you out of yourself
Uncork your drunkenness
Into cups made from skulls
Wrap you in a robe of words
Chew on your spicy locks
As sometimes in the madhouse
Men gnaw on their chains
By Rafiq Kathwari, guest poet at 3Quarks Daily.
by Tom Jacobs
The underlying bureaucratic key is the ability to deal with boredom. To function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human. To breathe, so to speak, without air. The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable. It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.”
~ David Foster Wallace
In one of the more amusing passages in David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, a character mistakenly enters the wrong university classroom and finds himself developing an unexpected interest in accounting. The Jesuit accounting professor delivers remarkably fascinating reflections on the subject during his lectures, at one point making the following claim:
Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is… The truth is that the heroism of your childhood entertainments was not true valour. It was theatre. The grand gesture, the moment of choice, the mortal danger, the external foe, the climactic battle whose outcome resolves all – all designed to appear heroic, to excite and gratify an audience… Gentlemen, welcome to the world of reality – there is no audience. No one to applaud, to admire… actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No one is interested.
The real heroes, it seems, are perhaps not those who make grand gestures or defeat foes but rather people like accountants: those who toil in obscurity and make the wheels of commerce and bureaucracy turn. Wallace called his last novel a “portrait of bureaucracy,” and the portrait offers is both horrifying and hopeful. His work explores this dialectic of ecstasy and crushing boredom, and the relation of freedom and rigid structure. Most intriguing is the way he understands the ecstasies and freedoms to be found even in the most boring and structured of scenarios—like working for the IRS.
In sympathy and solidarity with all those on the eastern seaboard who have suffered at the hand of last week's superstorm, including the many flooded art galleries in Chelsea, there is no art post today.
Tip-o-the-hat to Lauren Shaw, who will recognize this photograph of water as we love it.
by Anis Shivani
First fisting faggot,
we must outlaw reproduction
of everyone with a natural blonde,
except other. It is scary knowing
he has that football
to carry around.
Michelle Obama shakin her thang
to Beyonce’s song,
you go girl!
Terrorist fist bump
devolves into intimate
fisting for the Obamas.
He's really saying 69 sacks,
because they were talking about football.
Her character is blonde,
wears J.Crew and Theory suits (just one).
Tagg Romney whispered an apology
to Obama for wanting to punch
Michelle Obama nude redtube
candy everywhere (no, I’m not talking
about the blonde rookie, you pervs).
Three down, two to go:
Obama gives veiled threat to violent Syrian.
To re-elect Obama would be like the Titanic
backing up and hitting the iceberg again.
Blonde has given up the noc list
and I’ve been Valerie Plame’d.
Timberlake says taking blonde corporal
to the Marine Ball “changed my life.”
by Mara Jebsen
No one has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.–Zelda Fitzgerald
America is always far away, particularly in November. In November in New York, the mind bends toward California, or any way of imagining how chaotically big the country is. Is it possible to fathom that all of these people really belong together? This November, we are asked to consider the narratives and ideas that yoke us so uncomfortably. But we all seem to know different narratives and to consider them differently. For this reason, we should reflect on the rather remarkable combination of faith, apathy and sophistication that prevents us from resorting to bloodshed if we find ourselves governed by a party we dislike.
For some reason, in November, I become transfixed by the image of a transcontinental train. I think of the train tracks spanning from New Orleans to Los Angeles, carrying lots of hopeful and deperate families during the second wave of the Great Migration. I try to imagine this moment for this population: the first unsegregated streets, these first palms, the first blue glimpse of the Pacific. It is a moment in our history I do not know enough about.
Personally, I feel most patriotic when I am listening to Bob Dylan or Ray Charles. So much of American music seems to contain, and melodically resolve, our violent narratives within it. It makes one vainly wish that music could be a model; could be the idea that holds opposites together. All citizens, even musicians and poets, are occasionally called upon to test how much the heart can hold. Some artists can even make a career of it. I think of Whitman, containing, stretching, containing. I want to tell him: I, too, contain multitudes, but they don't always get along.
To expand the container, to even name the sensation of holding in your consciousness the idea of multitudes, the geographic vastness of this place, the strangeness of belonging to it, is very difficult. One November I mashed-up “Dying Swan” by the Duke Quartet, a snippet of Dylan lyrics, and a poem first published at fogged clarity as “Mirages,” but now renamed “America is Always Far Away.” I offer it in this container because I think it sounds a little like what it feels like to be here, now, nervous and determined, imagining America.
From Salon:
Sacks, on the other hand, has always been fascinated by outliers. It’s his professed belief that the underlying structures and functions of the brain can be most captivatingly glimpsed in the experiences of the man who mistook his wife for a hat and the man who kicked his own leg out of bed. This approach, not incidentally, also makes for much better stories than, say, descriptions of studies in which college students were asked to memorize numbers under trying circumstances. There’s an aura of self-help surrounding most popular neuroscience books today, with all the banality that term implies. What the Sacks style lacks in personal applicability it makes up for in marvels. So much so, in fact, that filmmaker Wes Anderson offered a parody version of Sacks in “The Royal Tenenbaums”: a shrink, played by Bill Murray, whose career is built on exhibiting his clients’ freakishness to the public.
More here.
From PhysOrg:
“Apart from their curiosity value, what's really interesting and useful about these knots of darkness is that they show you what the power flow is doing,” Dr Desyatnikov said. “It is part of the incredible progress science is making in the field of optics, we're beginning to do things with light that would have once seemed impossible.” “The idea of a knot of light is something scientists have been exploring for years and a few groups have managed to achieve just that by precisely engineering laser beams with “artificial” or “hand-made” knots. But what we've been working on are models in which the knots spontaneously form on their own, just like those annoying knots that you always get in electrical cables. “However unlike electrical cables which love to form knots, light doesn't. Scientists have found that inducing knots to form in laser beams by introducing perturbations in the form of laser speckle only very rarely induces knots. “Our models suggest that you have to get the key parameters of the light in a certain range before you can easily tie the light in knots but once you do, the knots are virtually guaranteed,” he said.
More here.
With a mind as formidable as his features, Colm Tóibín is now firmly a part of Ireland’s literary landscape. It’s both a blessing and a curse.
Nigel Farndale in The Telegraph:
The 57-year-old author shows me a work-in-progress on his desk, written in longhand in a notebook. “I have to write a first draft with a fountain pen before I type it up as a second,” he explains. “John Lanchester and Philip Hensher do the same. I bumped into them the other night and we were all doing our pen talk.”
Tóibín talks in a strong but ponderous voice — which is, by the way, as Irish as whiskey with an “e”. The deliberation, he reckons, may be a compensation for a childhood stammer. He avoids starting sentences with hard consonants. In conversation with him you have to hold your nerve and not rush to fill the long silences, as he is probably half way through a thought.
“I was waiting to get money out of a machine last night,” he tells me, “and there were these two lads who were slightly drunk messing about in front of me in the queue. The cheekier one looked at me and said: ‘So you’re busy at the moment?’ I must have been looking quite severe and was about to say ‘Yes I am, and I want to get home’ when he added ‘with the writing?’ and I had to smile. I took out my ink pen, held it up and went ‘Yeah’.”
More here.
Anis Shivani in Big Think:
I assert this because before Mitt Romney chose the first debate to unveil his etch-a-sketch moment—very smart, because it left little time for the obvious deceit to be exposed, and because he’d already signaled his allegiance to the extreme right for much of the campaign—he was headed for a historic loss. If Romney has any chance in the election, it’s only because he’s temporarily assumed the posture of a Massachusetts moderate, a persona relatively low-information voters partly bought into, as he repudiated every single extremist policy position of his, both domestic and international, over the course of three debates.
Romney and the Republicans, it was clear by October 3, could not win on their terms; the Romney-Ryan agenda was dead in the water, if it was going to be presented for what it really was. Voucherization of Medicare is a loser, as is ending abortion in cases of rape and incest, or self-deportation for “illegals.”
More here.
Noam Chomsky at his website:
The intensity of this commitment on the part of the Israeli political leadership has been dramatically illustrated just in the past few days, as they warn that they will “go crazy” if Palestinian rights are given limited recognition at the UN. That is not a new departure. The threat to “go crazy” (“nishtagea”) is deeply rooted, back to the Labor governments of the 1950s, along with the related “Samson Complex”: we will bring down the Temple walls if crossed. It was an idle threat then; not today.
The purposeful humiliation is also not new, though it constantly takes new forms. Thirty years ago political leaders, including some of the most noted hawks, submitted to Prime Minister Begin a shocking and detailed account of how settlers regularly abuse Palestinians in the most depraved manner and with total impunity. The prominent military-political analyst Yoram Peri wrote with disgust that the army’s task is not to defend the state, but “to demolish the rights of innocent people just because they are Araboushim (“niggers,” “kikes”) living in territories that God promised to us.”
More here.
Jump Cabling
When our cars touched,
When you lifted the hood of mine
To see the intimate workings underneath,
When we were bound together
By a pulse of pure energy,
When my car like the princess
In the tale woke with a start,
I thought why not ride the rest of the way together?
by Linda Pastan
from Light Tear
Dits Press, Cleveland, OH
Charles C. Mann in Orion Magazine:
Until Margulis’s death last year, she lived in my town, and I would bump into her on the street from time to time. She knew I was interested in ecology, and she liked to needle me. Hey, Charles, she would call out, are you still all worked up about protecting endangered species? Margulis was no apologist for unthinking destruction. Still, she couldn’t help regarding conservationists’ preoccupation with the fate of birds, mammals, and plants as evidence of their ignorance about the greatest source of evolutionary creativity: the microworld of bacteria, fungi, and protists. More than 90 percent of the living matter on earth consists of microorganisms and viruses, she liked to point out. Heck, the number of bacterial cells in our body is ten times more than the number of human cells! Bacteria and protists can do things undreamed of by clumsy mammals like us: form giant supercolonies, reproduce either asexually or by swapping genes with others, routinely incorporate DNA from entirely unrelated species, merge into symbiotic beings—the list is as endless as it is amazing. Microorganisms have changed the face of the earth, crumbling stone and even giving rise to the oxygen we breathe. Compared to this power and diversity, Margulis liked to tell me, pandas and polar bears were biological epiphenomena—interesting and fun, perhaps, but not actually significant.
Does that apply to human beings, too? I once asked her, feeling like someone whining to Copernicus about why he couldn’t move the earth a little closer to the center of the universe. Aren’t we special at all? This was just chitchat on the street, so I didn’t write anything down. But as I recall it, she answered that Homo sapiens actually might be interesting—for a mammal, anyway. For one thing, she said, we’re unusually successful.
More here.
Elissa Bassist in The Paris Review:
I’d lived in Brooklyn less than a month but had already settled into an inexplicable depression I’d nicknamed The Darkness. I couldn’t leave my apartment, except to attend class in Manhattan two nights a week. Sitting on the F train, I felt sure no one could lived in New York without a constantly replenished supply of antidepressants, courtesy of some kind of pharmaceutical Fresh Direct. The city and its boroughs, alternating blocks under perpetual construction, seemed to reflect its residents. Walking home on those Mondays and Wednesdays, I saw the funeral parlors and casket makers on what felt like every corner and wondered if funeral parlors and casket makers really were ubiquitous in New York, or if I was just noticing them more.
More here.
In the wake of the Lahore Institute of Management Sciences' (LUMS) decision to not renew Pervez Hoodbhoy's contract, Mohammad Taqi in Daily Times:
Pakistan has an unfortunate track record of hounding dissenters from Dr Fatima Ali Jinnahbhoy to Dr Pervez Amirali Hoodbhoy. And the bullying has gone on with impunity and without shame. The recent slap-on-the-wrist verdict by the Supreme Court (SC) in the 16-year-old Asghar Khan case barely scratches the surface of how institutionalised and deep the rot is.
A hyperactive judiciary that has been adjudicating anything from samosa prices to the National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO) 2007 and had no hesitation in sending an elected prime minister packing for non-implementation of its orders in the NRO case, danced around the substance of the Asghar Khan case. The SC has recommended action ‘under the law’ against the former army chief, General (retired) Mirza Aslam Beg and the ISI boss at the time, General (retired) Asad Durrani, for their illegal actions. The court effectively turfed the matter to the government by ordering it to set off this process through the Federal Investigation Agency.
The lawyer for the petitioner, the outstanding Salman Akram Raja, is spot on when he says that proceedings against the culprits should be initiated under Article six of the constitution. What could serve as the touchstone here is the SC’s own judgment in the Asma Jilani vs Government of Punjab case 1972 that, “As soon as the first opportunity arises, when the coercive apparatus falls from the hands of the usurper, he should be tried for high treason and suitably punished. This alone will serve as a deterrent to the would-be adventurers.” It would have certainly helped the civilian leadership if the SC had provided at least some clarity as to what exactly it had in mind when it directed the government to punish the offenders. The verdict left the door open to proceed potentially against the political activity of the president, but it would neither touch the political beneficiaries of the Mehran Bank-army collusion or the army itself with a 10-foot pole. Nonetheless, the ruling provides the civilian leadership an opportunity to proceed against those who have directly or indirectly, as in the 1990 stolen elections, usurped the people’s mandate or refused to honour it when the Pakistani people have spoken despite their machinations.
Meehan Crist and Tim Requarth in TNR:
IN THE MID-’80s, the political philosopher James Flynn noticed a remarkable but puzzling trend: for the past century, average IQ scores in every industrialized nation have been steadily rising. And not just a little: nearly three points every decade. Every several years, IQ tests test have to be “re-normed” so that the average remains 100. This means that a person who scored 100 a century ago would score 70 today; a person who tested as average a century ago would today be declared mentally retarded.
This bizarre finding—christened the “Flynn effect” by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray inThe Bell Curve—has since snowballed so much supporting evidence that in 2007 Malcolm Gladwell declared in The New Yorker that “the Flynn effect has moved from theory to fact.” But researchers still cannot agree on why scores are going up. Are we are simply getting better at taking tests? Are the tests themselves a poor measure of intelligence? Or do rising IQ scores really mean we are getting smarter?
In spite of his new book’s title, Flynn does not suggest a simple yes or no to this last question. It turns out that the greatest gains have taken place in subtests that measure abstract reasoning and pattern recognition, while subtests that depend more on previous knowledge show the lowest score increases. This imbalance may not reflect an increase in general intelligence, Flynn argues, but a shift in particular habits of mind. The question is not, why are we getting smarter, but the much less catchy, why are we getting better at abstract reasoning and little else?
