Doing Without

…………… it's an interesting
custom, involving such in-
visible items as the food
that's not on the table, the clothes
that are not on the back
the radio whose music
is silence. Doing without
is a great protector of reputations
since all places one cannot go
are fabulous, and only the rare and
enlightened plowman in his field
or on his mountain does not overrate
what he does not or cannot have.
Saluting through their windows
of cathedral glass those restaurants
we must not enter (unless like
burglars we become subject to
arrest) we greet with our twinkling
eyes the faces of others who do
without, the lady with the
fishing pole, and the man who looks
amused to have discovered on a walk
another piece of firewood.

by David Ray
from Gathering Firewood, 1974
Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT

From Harvard Magazine:

Self-fashioning is part of the age-old purpose of higher education, particularly in the liberal arts and sciences. The key point is to be aware, sometimes, that this is happening—to deliberately engage in fashioning—not just let events and experiences sweep you along without your conscious participation. Richard Brodhead expressed this well in his speech to the entering class as dean of Yale College in 1995: “You’ve come to one of the great fresh starts in your life, one of the few chances your life will offer to step away from the person you’ve been taken for and decide anew what you would like to become.” In this mood, students typically see college as a place where a new stage of life’s journey begins. “Incipit Vita Nova” was one motto of my alma mater, Wellesley, and it surely seemed appropriate at the time.

You now have this incredible opportunity to shape who you are as a person, what you are like, and what you seek for the future. You have both the time and the materials to do this. You may think you’ve never been busier in your life, and that’s probably true; but most of you have “time” in the sense of no other duties that require your attention and energy. Shaping your character is what you are supposed to do with your education; it’s not competing with something else. You won’t have many other periods in your life that will be this way until you retire when, if you are fortunate, you’ll have another chance; but then you will be more set in your ways, and may find it harder to change. You now also have the materials to shape your character and your purposes: the rich context, resources, incomparable opportunities that Harvard provides. And the combination of time and materials is truly an opportunity to treasure. My purpose in this essay is to think with you about how you might use this time and these materials wisely, with full awareness that this experience will be unique for each of you, but also the conviction that since countless other men and women have set out on the same journey, they can offer some perspectives that will be helpful to you now.

More here.

From ColumbiaNews:

Obesity is a lot more deadly than previously thought. Across recent decades, obesity accounted for 18 percent of deaths among Black and White Americans between the ages of 40 and 85, according to scientists. This finding challenges the prevailing wisdom among scientists, which puts that portion at around 5%.

…This study is the first to account for differences in age, birth cohort, sex, and race in analyzing Americans’ risk for death from obesity. “Past research in this area lumped together all Americans, but obesity prevalence and its effect on mortality differ substantially based on your race or ethnicity, how old you are, and when you were born,” says Dr. Masters. “It’s important for policy-makers to understand that different groups experience obesity in different ways.” The researchers analyzed 19 waves of the National Health Interview Survey linked to individual mortality records in the National Death Index for the years 1986 to 2006, when the most recent data are available. They focused on ages 40 to 85 in order to exclude accidental deaths, homicides, and congenital conditions that are the leading causes of death for younger people.

…In the groups studied, Black women had the highest risk of dying from obesity or being overweight at 27 percent, followed by White women at 21 percent. Obesity in Black women is nearly twice that of White women. White men fared better at 15%, and the lowest risk for dying from being obese was 5%, for Black men. While White men and Black men have similar rates of obesity, the effect of obesity on mortality is lower in Black men because it is “crowded out” by other risk factors, from high rates of cigarette smoking to challenging socioeconomic conditions. There were insufficient data to make estimates for Asians, Hispanics, and other groups due to the highly stratified nature of the methodology.

More here.

Michael Graziano in Aeon Magazine:

Lately, the problem of consciousness has begun to catch on in neuroscience. How does a brain generate consciousness? In the computer age, it is not hard to imagine how a computing machine might construct, store and spit out the information that ‘I am alive, I am a person, I have memories, the wind is cold, the grass is green,’ and so on. But how does a brain become aware of those propositions? The philosopher David Chalmers has claimed that the first question, how a brain computes information about itself and the surrounding world, is the ‘easy’ problem of consciousness. The second question, how a brain becomes aware of all that computed stuff, is the ‘hard’ problem.

I believe that the easy and the hard problems have gotten switched around. The sheer scale and complexity of the brain’s vast computations makes the easy problem monumentally hard to figure out. How the brain attributes the property of awareness to itself is, by contrast, much easier. If nothing else, it would appear to be a more limited set of computations. In my laboratory at Princeton University, we are working on a specific theory of awareness and its basis in the brain. Our theory explains both the apparent awareness that we can attribute to Kevin and the direct, first-person perspective that we have on our own experience. And the easiest way to introduce it is to travel about half a billion years back in time.

Rick Perlstein in The Nation:

Here’s a personal observation with a political thrust: if I were single, I don’t think I could handle dating a graduate student in the humanities or the social sciences. Or someone with a PhD but not a tenure-track job. Or perhaps even a junior professor working for tenure. When I close my eyes and think of friends who’re sweating their way up that greasy poll to find steady work as a professional scholar, the images I come up with are of people at wits’ end, often hardly capable of healthy relationships at all.

I think of one, a recently minted history doctorate, for whom a two-year postdoctoral fellowship fortuitously dropped from the sky—but whom before that happened I regularly had to almost literally talk down from the ledge, so frazzled was she by the thought of piecing together more years with a $15,000 income; or maybe (she didn’t have any teaching lined up for this fall when the postdoc came through) no income at all.

I think of another, a gifted and committed teacher, the single mother of a disabled son, whose employer, a downtown commuter college, began cutting her course load the more experienced she got—the better she got—because it was cheaper to hire teachers who were green. She referred to this as her “poverty summer,” and I think she was near to the ledge too.

There’s another guy, a romance languages doctorate from one of the world’s great research universities, also a gifted and committed teacher. He came from a working-class background—his dad drives a truck for Coca-Cola, and he himself has had jobs like warehouseman and forklift driver. Because of all that, he possessed a psychological profile that made thriving in academia difficult: namely, he is self-possessed, confident and utterly lacking in the other-directed brown-nose-itutde that is the mark of the modern professional managerial class. When he realized that most critical theory wasn’t to his taste, he avoided it—except when he had to parrot it back to his professors to pass his field exams. He also didn’t frantically seek lines on his curriculum vitae, grinding the same research into half a dozen all-but-identical conference papers. He didn’t suck up. Instead, all he did was write a brilliant dissertation with a timely and politically relevant theme, in elegant, readable prose. All the while he feasted upon books about every subject under the sun (an insatiable auto-didact; his love of knowledge burns more brightly than that of just about anyone I’ve ever met, and outshines every professor I know. Simultaneously, a natural-born teacher, he joyfully practiced the arts of citizenship just about every day of the week in the form of long and passionate and generous e-mails to his working-class relatives, most of them Christian conservatives, teaching them about the sins of the national security state, the historical accomplishments of the welfare state, and so on and so forth. In a better world, academia would beat a path to his gentleman’s door. Instead, he knows tenured employment is almost unimaginable. So he’s applied to about a hundred jobs this summer, desperate to keep up with his mortgage—every kind of job, including one as an on-campus building manager. He finally ended up with a year-long contract at a private school teaching science to eighth graders. Though he has no particular interest in and no experience with science, he’s glad to be working at all.

I think about a junior professor I know, also at a great research university—I have to be careful here; academics are petty, and who knows what identifying detail might set off one of (his or her) colleagues on whom the rest of (her or his) professional life depends—who is up for tenure this year.

When Waking Life, the sixth film by writer-director Richard Linklater, drifted into theaters in late 2001, I, for one, was not prepared. My memory of the first viewing recalls mainly my own impatience — an unusual movie falling victim to mood. Rather than being enveloped by its cloudy, rotoscopic dream world or engaged by the simultaneously floaty and weighty intellectual axis traversed by its nameless protagonist, I felt left out, stuck in the immediate world, with its new threat-level rainbow and clenched posture of dread. Taking another look almost twelve years later, in the wake of writing about Linklater’s Before trilogy and marriage at the movies for the August issue of Harper’s, I had a much different response. Perhaps I’m a little sea-blind, or riding a swell of admiration for a director whose sensibility has only clarified and grown more consistent with time (spoiler alert: I love the Before films). But I sensed throughout Waking Life echoes of the trilogy’s themes: memory, dream life, the nature of reality; the way all three work within and without a person to form his or her (or their) story; and cinema’s essential sympathies and fidelities to that process.

more from Michelle Orange at Harper’s here.

My dog-eared copy of Philosophical Investigations still bears the scars of my 19-year-old student self. Among the underlinings and margin notes are the scribbled phone numbers of former girlfriends now, alas, forgotten: Lynda 2814749, Lucy 2854633, Soni 2845590. From the third year of university, this book was a constant companion. Part notepad, part diary, part address book, but wholly and life-changingly inspirational. Wittgenstein’s familiar, intense face peers through a coffee stain from the light green cover, bearing the look of a man ill at ease with the world, like some secular saint whose distance from the rest of humanity is both his gift and his curse. And yet, the photograph is so out of kilter with what I learned from the book itself. For the photograph invites a sense that there is something absolutely extraordinary going on inside Wittgenstein’s head, something unique, something tantalisingly beyond comprehension.

more from Giles Fraser at The Guardian here.

I came to the Himalayas not because of a dream of mountains or of animals, but because of a map. I first encountered it in the municipal library I visited as a child. It was a looming sandstone affair, the type beloved of Andrew Carnegie, ornamented and buttressed in a grand Victorian style. You entered directly from the street through varnished wooden doors heavy with brass and glass. There was a grand corridor, a cool mineral smell, and stairs of pale granite scuffed by a century of soles. Thanks to the indulgence of my parents, as well as the egalitarianism of the Scots library system, I was given a ticket to enter the adult library from the age of eight. Once there, I’d often sit down on the scratchy brown carpet tiles and lose myself in the reference atlas. One of the most astonishing features of the atlas was that nearly half of it was index – an infinity of names, in microscopic print, of towns and villages, rivers and mountains, that I could never hope to see. Even at that age I knew it was unlikely I’d ever walk the streets of Télé or Tele, or wake up in Telele or Telén*, though I still held out hopes for New York, Cairo, or Montevideo.

more from Gavin Francis at Granta here.

Richard Lewis in Orion Magazine:

The blur of light
conquers the dark.
I awake dazzled.
—David, age 11

THE WIND WAS SCURRYING across the streets of New York, and the children had just arrived at school. I’d recently begun working with children in poetry and drama, and that morning I had the good fortune of beginning my day in a large open space of a room with a group of ten-year-olds. We gathered ourselves in a small circle and spoke of the rush and impatience of the autumn air that seemed to have brought us there. I asked everyone to take their arms and imitate the wind’s movement, and it was instantly clear that we needed more elbow room—so I suggested we get up and move like the wind. What I thought might turn into bedlam was suddenly a wonderfully expressive dance in which each child’s arms and legs, hands and feet were turning and moving in individual ways, as if they had found something in the wind that they already knew. When it seemed appropriate to slow down, I asked everyone to find a space on the floor and, if the image of the wind was still clear to them, to write down what they had seen and felt.

…

My meadow is beautiful.
It has doves,
Morning Dew
And my laughter.

—Aisha

Mmm . . . I smell that smell. I feel like
a reindeer ready to rest in a free world,
waiting for my mother to feed me so I can
rest.

—Baholoame

My meadow feels like
The gala of all meadows.
There are roses blooming,
Buttercups growing,
Daisies smiling,
Pansies swaying in the wind,
Black-eyed susans growing . . .

—Dwayne

The slither of light is very beautiful.
As I look through it I can see the world.

—Jennifer

More here.

From Smithsonian:

The saying goes that one person’s waste is another’s treasure. For those scientists who study urine the saying is quite literal–pee is a treasure-trove of scientific potential. It can now be used as a source of electric power. Uine-eating bacteria can create a strong enough current to power a cell phone. Medicines derived from urine can help treat infertility and fight symptoms of menopause. Stem cells harvested from urine have been reprogrammed into neurons and even used to grow human teeth. For modern scientists, the golden liquid can be, well, liquid gold. But a quick look back in history shows that urine has always been important to scientific and industrial advancement, so much so that the ancient Romans not only sold pee collected from public urinals, but those who traded in urine had to pay a tax. So what about pee did preindustrial humans find so valuable? Here are a few examples:

Urine-soaked leather makes it soft: Prior to the ability to synthesize chemicals in the lab, urine was a quick and rich source of urea, a nitrogen-based organic compound. When stored for long periods of time, urea decays into ammonia. Ammonia in water acts as a caustic but weak base. Its high pH breaks down organic material, making urine the perfect substance for ancients to use in softening and tanning animal hides. Soaking animal skins in urine also made it easier for leather workers to remove hair and bits of flesh from the skin.

The cleansing power of pee: If you’ve investigated the ingredients in your household cleaners, you may have noticed a prevalent ingredient: ammonia. As a base, ammonia is a useful cleanser because dirt and grease–which are slightly acidic–get neutralized by the ammonia. Even though early Europeans knew about soap, many launderers preferred to use urine for its ammonia to get tough stains out of cloth. In fact, in ancient Rome, vessels for collecting urine were commonplace on streets–passers-by would relieve themselves into them and when the vats were full their contents were taken to a fullonica (a laundry), diluted with water and poured over dirty clothes. A worker would stand in the tub of urine and stomp on the clothes, similar to modern washing machine’s agitator.

More here.

Ayeda Iftikhar in Newsweek:

Her works are part of the permanent collections of some of the world’s most famous museums—the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, the Guggenheim. In 2005, The New York Times called her an “an artist on the verge of shaking things up.” The year before that, Newsweek counted her among the clutch of overachieving South Asians “transforming America’s cultural landscape.” Shahzia Sikander, arguably Pakistan’s most famous living modern artist, has been wowing the international art world with her multidisciplinary works inspired from Mughal-era miniature painting techniques and tropes. She’s been scoring accolades since graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1995. Last year, the U.S. secretary of State awarded her the Inaugural Medal of Art. She’s previously won a MacArthur “Genius Grant.” While Pakistan hasn’t entirely ignored Sikander—she won the President’s National Pride of Honor award in 2005—she’s hardly a household name in her home country, and viewed by Pakistani critics as an outlier. We spoke with Sikander recently about her art and life. Excerpts:

From the National College of Arts in Lahore to the pinnacle of the global art scene, what’s the journey been like for you?

Complex, the way life is. It’s hard to summarize more than two decades in a single answer—besides, the journey is still unfolding. In retrospect I would have, perhaps, made some different decisions, but I’m appreciative of all the opportunities and detours I experienced that helped me develop my ability to think and express.

You’ve rarely held any shows in Pakistan, why?

Not being invited in any serious manner to exhibit works in Pakistan is an issue. Compounding the situation is also the fact that almost all of my work got collected rapidly by international museums in the late 1990s and early 2000s. To show the work, it has to be loaned directly from the [collecting] institutions. It was never as simple as putting the work in a suitcase to be brought over to Pakistan to exhibit.

More here.

Gina Apostol responds to Mark O'Connell's New Yorker review of two new books about Borges, in the LA Review of Books:

Certainly, Borges’s statements about his indifference to politics are alarming:

I am not politically minded. I am aesthetically minded, philosophically perhaps. I don’t belong to any party. In fact, I disbelieve in politics and in nations. I disbelieve also in richness, in poverty. Those things are illusions. But I believe in my own destiny as a good or bad or indifferent writer.

To be honest, as I read this, I start laughing. You can, of course, believe Borges — why not, if he says so? But you can also see him performing his double act, enacting the writer Borges, the provocative, public intellectual that the I abhors in that terse masterpiece, “Borges and I.” Interestingly, O’Connell begins his review with a quote from that instructive story:

“I like hourglasses,” [the I narrator] writes, “maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee, and the prose of Stevenson; [Borges] shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor.”

And yet when it comes to Borges’s actorly statements about politics, O’Connell fails to give the writer the benefit of Borges’s own skepticism of his public self.

What is it about the writer in the First World that wants the Third World writer to be nakedly political, a blunt instrument bludgeoning his world’s ills? What is it about the critic that seems to wish upon the Third World the martyred activist who dies for a cause (O’Connell: “In his own country, six coups d’etat and three dictatorships” — one hears exclamation points of disappointment)? Where does this goddamned fantasy come from — that fantasy of the oppressed Third World artist who must risk his life to speak out, who’s not allowed to stay in bed and just read Kidnapped? I have to say, look at it this way: It only benefits dictatorships when all the Ken Saro-Wiwas die — and the loss of all the Ken Saro-Wiwas diminishes us all. Why is it not okay that an old man in Argentina lives for his art — and yet it is okay for a writer in The New Yorker whose country is targeting civilians abroad in precision assassinations to merely sit and write reviews about dead Argentines whose political feelings are insufficiently pronounced? Where is the great American artist leading his fellow citizens in barricades against the NSA? And why are these New Yorker critics not calling them out for their “refusal to engage with politics”?

Although it is amusing to imagine a blind librarian in Buenos Aires brandishing his weapons of Kipling tomes against the old junta, it is less possible to imagine Jonathan Franzen or Jeffrey Eugenides risking jail at all for any reason. Why are Americans allowed to be more cowardly than others?

Michael Ignatieff in the Boston Review:

When state order collapses, as it did in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, as it is doing now in Syria, chaos unleashes existential fear among all the groups who had once sheltered under the protection of the state. Such fear makes it difficult to sustain multi-confessional, pluralist, tolerant orders when dictatorship falls apart. When state order collapses, every confessional or ethnic group asks one question: Who will protect us now?

As Sunni, Alawite, Christian, Druze and Shia ask this question, they know the only possible answer is themselves. In a Hobbesian situation—a war of all against all—each individual gravitates back to the security offered by their clan, sect or ethnic group, or more precisely, to those individuals within those groups who offer armed protection. This is especially the case when dictatorships collapse, for in this case a security vacuum emerges on top of a political one. In a state that never permitted mobilization of political parties across sectarian, clan, or ethnic divides, none of these groups has learned to trust each other in a political order. They may share a hatred of the dictator and a fear of what comes next, but not much else. Politics has never brought them together before. Now they are faced with security dilemmas and they conclude, rationally enough, that they can only face these dilemmas alone, in the safety of their own group. Such was the case in the former Yugoslavia. Such is the case now in Syria.

More here.

Luck plays a big part in presidents’ reputations – and not just in terms of what happens while they are in office (wars give presidents a boost; financial crises don’t). There is also the luck of who writes their biographies once they have gone. In this respect, the luckiest president of the past century has been Lyndon Johnson, the subject of a monumental, multivolume labour of love by the pre-eminent political biographer Robert Caro that has redeemed the ex-president’s reputation. Caro’s LBJ emerges as the ultimate fixer, a politician who knew better than anyone how to get his way in the vipers’ nest of Washington. Because of Caro, it’s Johnson’s wiles that people look to when they ask how Barack Obama could do better in his dealings with Congress. As LBJ’s stock has risen, that of his predecessor has fallen. John F Kennedy has become the man who merely talked about the transformative legislative programme that Johnson turned into reality.

more from David Runciman at The New Statesman here.

The old saw that a picture is worth a thousand words may still be true, but it always takes at least a few words to unlock the meaning, to let the picture tell its story. And a different word will make for a different story, a divergent meaning. Artists have been worrying for a long time about the peculiar relationship between pictures and their captions, between showing and saying, and because the relationship is always in flux, the worrying isn’t likely to stop. The American artist Lorna Simpson has been exploring this quandary since the beginning of her career, and an early piece like Twenty Questions (A Sampler), from 1986, is typical. Four seemingly identical black-and-white photographs—tondos rather than rectangles—show the back of the head of a young black woman who is wearing a simple white sleeveless outfit against a black background. It is often assumed that the face turned away from the viewer is Simpson’s. It is not. But this may be one of those instances where misidentification—an explicit concern of her work—carries its own kind of truth. If artists like Cindy Sherman can use themselves as models in order to represent other people, who can say for sure that using other people as models is not a way of representing oneself?

more from Barry Schwabsky at The Nation here.

Richard Wagner will not be ignored. The two-hundredth birthday of the “Sorcerer of Bayreuth,” to borrow the title of a recent book by Barry Millington, arrived on May 22nd, and the sixteen-hour epic that is “The Ring of the Nibelung” has rolled through New York, London, Berlin, Munich, Vienna, Milan, Paris, and a dozen other cities—most notably, the Wagner capital of Bayreuth, whose adjective-defying new “Ring” makes all others look timid and sane. By the end of the year, there will have been more than forty performances of the cycle, from Riga to Melbourne. Record companies are releasing deluxe boxed sets of Wagner; sadly, the most vital of them, Sony’s archival collection “Wagner at the Met,” stops in 1954. Dozens of new Wagner books are appearing, including Millington’s handsome volume and, later this year, the nine-hundred-page Cambridge Wagner Encyclopedia, whose entries range from “absolute music” to “Zurich,” by way of “Baudelaire,” “Nietzsche,” and “pets.” It would be good to report that the anniversary year has yielded a raft of fresh insights. Alas, outside of scholarly precincts, discussion of Wagner is stuck in a Nazi rut. His multifarious influence on artistic, intellectual, and political life has been largely forgotten; in the media, it is practically obligatory to identify him as “Hitler’s favorite composer.”

more from Alex Ross at The New Yorker here.

A poem may have more than one mind and whatever was on Alberto Rios' mind when he wrote this it might just as well have been called “A Small Story About Fukushima“.

Andrew Sullivan in The Daily Dish:

Readers know I have been grappling for a while with the vexing question of the balance between the surveillance state and the threat of Jihadist terrorism. When the NSA leaks burst onto the scene, I was skeptical of many of the large claims made by civil libertarians and queasily sympathetic to a program that relied on meta-data alone, as long as it was transparent, had Congressional buy-in, did not accidentally expose innocent civilians to grotesque privacy loss, and was watched by a strong FISA court.

Since then, I’ve watched the debate closely and almost all the checks I supported have been proven illusory. The spying is vastly more extensive than anyone fully comprehended before; the FISA court has been revealed as toothless and crippled; and many civilians have had their privacy accidentally violated over 3000 times. The president, in defending the indefensible, has damaged himself and his core reputation for honesty and candor. These cumulative revelations have exposed this program as, at a minimum, dangerous to core liberties and vulnerable to rank abuse. I’ve found myself moving further and further to Glenn’s position.

What has kept me from embracing it entirely has been the absence of any real proof than any deliberate abuse has taken place and arguments that it has helped prevent terror attacks. This may be too forgiving a standard. If a system is ripe for abuse, history tells us the only question is not if such abuse will occur, but when. So it is a strange and awful irony that the Coalition government in Britain has today clinched the case for Glenn.

More here.

Sukant Khurana in Counter Currents:

It is very rare that individuals are institutions in themselves. Such individuals are genuine visionaries who start a wave, who create a school of thought and like a banyan tree keep extending inspiring branches through offshoots much beyond when they are gone. The late Obaid Siddiqi, who many rightly consider the father of modern Indian biology and the last of the giants of the South Asian science scene, was one such rare individual. While risking the shallow deification of the late protagonist of this article, I write this piece, hoping that a few people would understand that it is not the person but the vision that this is a personal tribute to and they would strive to pick up the torch where the last generation left it.

Obaid Siddiqi, who strove to transform the life sciences in South Asia recently died of a freak road accident. True to his dream of a peaceful, considerate, educated and scientific society, his family decided to not press charges on the young careless driver that hit him, as it would ruin his career and education.

My article is far from a perfect tribute to my first scientific mentor as it deals solely with my personal interactions with him in order to bring forth his ideas that continue to inspire me, instead of details of his tremendously long list of achievements or his interactions with hundreds of other very well accomplished students that continue to contribute to science and society world over. The greatest biologist that South Asian soil has sprung so far, Obaid Siddiqi, despised personal publicity and his motto was simply to just do your job quietly without worrying about the results.

More here.