Ross Perlin in Dissent:

Every language has a complex grammar—an almost invisible glue between words that enables meaning-making—and new vocabulary can always be borrowed or coined. Some languages may specialize in melancholy, or seaweed, or atomic structure, or religious ritual; some grammars may glory in conjugating verbs while others bristle with syntactic invention. Hawaiian has just thirteen phonemes (meaningful sounds) while the Caucasian language Ubykh, extinct as of 1992, had eighty-four. “English” (with all its technical varieties) is said to be adding up to 8,500 words per year, more than many Australian aboriginal languages have to begin with. But these are surface inequalities—questions of personality.

Perceptions of linguistic superiority or inferiority are instead based on power, class, and social status. Historically, it was languages that were swept in with strong political, economic, or religious backing—Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, and Chinese in the Eurasian core—that were held to be the oldest, the holiest, and the most perfect in structure, their “classical” status cemented by the received weight of canonical tradition. By the nineteenth century, the imperial nation-states of Europe were politely shunting them off to the museum and imposing their own equivalents: newly standardized “modern” languages like English and French. Johann Gottfried Herder’s Treatise on the Origin of Language (1772) inspired would-be nation-builders to document, restore, and develop their own neglected vernaculars. One by one, the nationalists of Central and Eastern Europe adopted Herder’s program, as has virtually every modern nation-state sooner or later: warding off imperial languages from without by establishing a dominant standardized language within, at the expense of minority languages and local varieties.

More here.

The QPP

The quietly pacifist peaceful
always die
to make room for men
who shout. Who tell lies to
children, and crush the corners
off of old men's dreams.
And now I find your name,
scrawled large in someone's
blood, on this survival list.
.

by Alice Walker
from Her Blue Body Everything We Know
Harvest Books, 1991

A Roundtable on The History Manifesto: The Role of History and the Humanities in a Digital Age from Heyman Center/Society of Fellows on Vimeo.

From the introduction of The History Manifesto, “a call to arms to historians and everyone interested in the role of history in contemporary society. Leading historians David Armitage and Jo Guldi identify a recent shift back to longer-term narratives, following many decades of increasing specialization, which they argue is vital for the future of historical scholarship and how it is communicated.”

A spectre is haunting our time: the spectre of the short term.

Jeffrey Aaron Snyder reviews Lani Guinier's The Tyranny of Meritocracy: Democratizing Higher Education in America in Boston Review (Image: zaveqna):

“The world . . . provides us with more than one correct answer to most questions,” Guinier says, and nods to Bard College President Leon Botstein who tells us that no professional “pursues her vocation” by choosing the “right” answer from “a set of prescribed alternatives that trivialize complexity and ambiguity.” Incisive points, to be sure, but there are alternatives to the multiple-choice format. Many standardized tests, for instance, now include “open-response” items, which require students to fashion their own answers rather than simply choosing the one “correct” answer from a ready-made list. In my view, however, the limitations of standardized testing with respect to prefabricated questions are far more important than the shortcomings associated with prefabricated answers. The ability to formulate a significant question is a hugely important skill, especially for college-level work, and one that no standardized test even attempts to measure. Standardized tests, then, too often reinforce the dreary lesson taught by many schools that it is the job of students to answer rather than to ask questions.

I never thought I would feel compelled to defend the integrity of the College Board or the number-crunchers at U.S. News and World Report, but a few corrections of the kind of fanciful exaggerations favored by anti-testing crusaders are in order. It has been over twenty years since the SAT ceased to be an acronym but it seems the SAT will always be known as the Scholastic Aptitude Test in the popular imagination, forever associated with the attempt to measure native intellectual ability. Guinier only reinforces this common misconception, stating that the SAT “doesn’t even pretend to measure achievement.” But as the College Board website explains, the SAT “doesn’t test logic or abstract reasoning.” Rather, “it tests the skills you’re learning in school: reading, writing and math.” In other words, today’s SAT is meant to be an achievement rather than an aptitude test.

Guinier, like many critics of the SAT, is dismissive of the test’s predictive power, claiming that the correlation between SAT scores and first-year college grade-point-average is “very, very slight.” In fact, most studies put the figure in the neighborhood of .45, which is a shade higher than the correlation between rates of smoking and incidences of lung cancer. It is also only a tad lower than the correlation between cumulative high school GPA and first-year college GPA.

Finally, according to Guinier, the U.S. News annual college rankings “rely heavily on SAT scores for their calculations.” Admissions test scores actually account for just over 8 percent of a school’s ranking.

More here.

Marilynne Robinson in the NYRB (photo from Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore):

In the last year of his life he wrote a prose poem, Eureka, which would have established this fact beyond doubt—if it had not been so full of intuitive insight that neither his contemporaries nor subsequent generations, at least until the late twentieth century, could make any sense of it. Its very brilliance made it an object of ridicule, an instance of affectation and delusion, and so it is regarded to this day among readers and critics who are not at all abreast of contemporary physics. Eureka describes the origins of the universe in a single particle, from which “radiated” the atoms of which all matter is made. Minute dissimilarities of size and distribution among these atoms meant that the effects of gravity caused them to accumulate as matter, forming the physical universe.

This by itself would be a startling anticipation of modern cosmology, if Poe had not also drawn striking conclusions from it, for example that space and “duration” are one thing, that there might be stars that emit no light, that there is a repulsive force that in some degree counteracts the force of gravity, that there could be any number of universes with different laws simultaneous with ours, that our universe might collapse to its original state and another universe erupt from the particle it would have become, that our present universe may be one in a series.

All this is perfectly sound as observation, hypothesis, or speculation by the lights of science in the twenty-first century. And of course Poe had neither evidence nor authority for any of it. It was the product, he said, of a kind of aesthetic reasoning—therefore, he insisted, a poem. He was absolutely sincere about the truth of the account he had made of cosmic origins, and he was ridiculed for his sincerity. Eureka is important because it indicates the scale and the seriousness of Poe’s thinking, and its remarkable integrity. It demonstrates his use of his aesthetic sense as a particularly rigorous method of inquiry.

More here.

Francis Beckett in New Humanist:

Betrayed: The English Catholic Church and the Sex Abuse Crisis (Biteback) by Richard Scorer.

The Devil’s Advocate: Child Abuse and the Men in Black (Devil’s Advocate Library) by Graham Wilmer

Priestly sex abuse has done far more harm to the Catholic Church in the USA, Canada, Ireland and Australia than it has in Britain, which leads some British Catholics to the comforting conclusion that there is less of it here. But at least 61 Catholic priests have been convicted of sexual offences in the criminal courts of England and Wales since 1990, and there may well be more, for the church still has no single centralised record of known offenders. However, American courts award much higher sums in compensation to victims, which is why American dioceses have been ruined. And the English Catholic Church has been ruthless in its efforts to keep the lid on the scandal, to silence victims, and to protect priests who use young children for their own sexual gratification.

Over and over again, the princes of the church have silently and cynically moved a priest from one school or parish where he was discovered to be abusing children, to another where he was unknown and could find more children to abuse. Of course children were abused in many institutions, not just Catholic ones, but the fact, though Catholics refuse to face it, is that the church had a culture of abuse like no other organisation. If there was ever any doubt about that, two new books have dispelled it. Richard Scorer is a lawyer who has represented many victims of priestly sexual abuse. He has written Betrayal in clear, luminous prose, telling us only what he has heard and seen. He avoids conjecture, does not seem to be anti-Catholic and does not editorialise. The result is compulsive reading.

More here.

Alexis Forss at The Guardian:

Seven years have passed since the death of Norman Mailer, and a campaign is being waged in his name on several fronts. The publication late last year of J Michael Lennon’s authorised biography asked us to contemplate what its title referred to as a double life. A series of Random House reissues shifts attention to the essays and novels. With the release of the selected letters the most congenial approach to Mailer is illuminated: one in which the works and days are understood as marching, like his “armies of the night”, in lockstep. If John Updike’s larger body of work somehow seems a less of a vertiginous challenge than Mailer’s 44 books, it is because Updike’s chief legacy is his style: the profusion of opiate sentences that delivers us hit after euphoric hit. Mailer bequeathed us no style. What he wanted to do was to save our souls, and that was a battle to be fought in a variety of guises: General Marijuana, Aquarius, the Prisoner, and, of course, the Great Illeist – someone who refers to themselves in the third person – Norman Mailer himself. Selected Letters of Norman Mailergrants us access to the dressing room.

Lennon’s role as custodian of Mailer’s literary estate may seem redundant: after all, acting as his own curator was part of Mailer’s addiction to self‑dramatisation. Commencing with the taming and recontextualisation of the juvenilia and marginalia in 1959’s Advertisements for Myself, he was determined to frame his own works and set the parameters within which they were to be considered. However, his executor’s pruning proves indispensable: having given himself over to the fanatical labour of making a selection from more than 45,000 letters, Lennon presents us with 716 key missives, dating from 1940 to Mailer’s death in 2007.

more here.

Franklin Foer at The New York Times:

“A Voice Still Heard” appears at a relatively inert moment in American intellectual life and, therefore, at just the right time. Though Howe’s reputation dissipated quickly after his death in 1993, he was an American Orwell: our most thrilling dissident, a socialist with conservative cultural sympathies, a scything polemicist capable of the most tender, patient literary explication. Unlike Orwell, Howe never went on great foreign adventures — there was no journalism in him. And his standing will never be buoyed by his novels, because there aren’t any. But Orwell and Howe shared a romantic vision of their chosen path in life, and it’s that ­marrow-deep commitment to heterodoxy that makes the current climate feel uninspired and careerist by contrast.

Howe grew up in what Paul Goodman called decent poverty in the immigrant Bronx, although his family couldn’t even afford to hold his bar mitzvah in his neighborhood synagogue. It was socialism, with its radiant dialectics and its universalist promise of shared bonds with a world beyond the ghetto, that excited his young mind. (Not that he was alone in this obsession, especially not in the outer boroughs in the thick of the Depression.) He gravitated to the figure of the warrior-essayist Leon Trotsky.

Socialism did plenty to distort his young mind.

more here.

Mark Mazower at the Financial Times:

Tony Judt was a historian whose journalism includes some of the finest things he wrote. At the time of his death from motor neurone disease in 2010 at the age of 62, he was a fixture of the Manhattan intellectual scene and his regular platform in the New York Review of Books allowed him to excoriate the follies of politicians and pundits alike. He was no stranger to controversy. But the essays collected in When the Facts Change remind us that he was much more than a controversialist. Composed during the last 15 years of Judt’s life, they chart the gradual souring of hope across the west that took place once the cold war’s euphoric end disappeared from view, and the feel-good Clinton era gave way to George W Bush and the everlasting war on terror.

When he came to teach in New York, Judt was chiefly known for a series of scholarly works on French socialism. If one precondition for his emergence as a public intellectual was the Manhattan cultural scene, another was his own response to the fall of the Berlin Wall and its aftermath. Better and faster than anyone else, Judt realised that in order to rethink Europe’s future, it was necessary to rethink its past. In the early 1990s, he turned himself into a genuine Europeanist, forging links with scholars in central and eastern Europe, hosting conferences and seminars at which he presided with characteristically self-deprecating energy.

more here.

Gift

He said: here is my soul.
I did not want his soul
but I am a Southerner
and very polite.
I took it lightly
as it was offered. But did not
chain it down.
I loved it and tended
it. I would hand it back
as good as new.

He said: How dare you want
my soul! Give it back!
How greedy you are!
It is a trait
I had not noticed
before!

I said: But your soul
never left you. It was only
a heavy thought from
your childhood
passed to me for safekeeping.

But he never believed me.
Until the end
he called me possessive
and held his soul
so tightly
it shrank
to fit his hand.

by Alice Walker
from Her Blue Body Everything We Know
Harvest Books, 1991

Leon Wieseltier in The New York Times:

Amid the bacchanal of disruption, let us pause to honor the disrupted. The streets of American cities are haunted by the ghosts of bookstores and record stores, which have been destroyed by the greatest thugs in the history of the culture industry. Writers hover between a decent poverty and an indecent one; they are expected to render the fruits of their labors for little and even for nothing, and all the miracles of electronic dissemination somehow do not suffice for compensation, either of the fiscal or the spiritual kind. Everybody talks frantically about media, a second-order subject if ever there was one, as content disappears into “content.” What does the understanding of media contribute to the understanding of life? Journalistic institutions slowly transform themselves into silent sweatshops in which words cannot wait for thoughts, and first responses are promoted into best responses, and patience is a professional liability. As the frequency of expression grows, the force of expression diminishes: Digital expectations of alacrity and terseness confer the highest prestige upon the twittering cacophony of one-liners and promotional announcements. It was always the case that all things must pass, but this is ridiculous.

Meanwhile the discussion of culture is being steadily absorbed into the discussion of business. There are “metrics” for phenomena that cannot be metrically measured. Numerical values are assigned to things that cannot be captured by numbers. Economic concepts go rampaging through noneconomic realms: Economists are our experts on happiness! Where wisdom once was, quantification will now be. Quantification is the most overwhelming influence upon the contemporary American understanding of, well, everything. It is enabled by the idolatry of data, which has itself been enabled by the almost unimaginable data-generating capabilities of the new technology. The distinction between knowledge and information is a thing of the past, and there is no greater disgrace than to be a thing of the past. Beyond its impact upon culture, the new technology penetrates even deeper levels of identity and experience, to cognition and to consciousness. Such transformations embolden certain high priests in the church of tech to espouse the doctrine of “transhumanism” and to suggest, without any recollection of the bankruptcy of utopia, without any consideration of the cost to human dignity, that our computational ability will carry us magnificently beyond our humanity and “allow us to transcend these limitations of our biological bodies and brains. . . . There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine.” (The author of that updated mechanistic nonsense is a director of engineering at Google.)

More here.

Alberto Acerbi over at the LSE's International Cognition and Culture Instiute, with comments in the comment section by Pascal Boyer (pictured), Dan Sperber and others:

Every year the website edge.org asks their panel a general question on science and/or society. The 2014 question was: “What scientific idea is ready for retirement?“ I did not read (yet) all the answers, but I was surprised to see that two of them, from Pascal Boyer and John Tooby, were one and the same: culture. One could take the answers as a provocation of two evolutionary psychology-minded scholars against mainstream cultural anthropology (which I’d subscribe to). However, knowing Boyer and Tooby's work, and since, when people ask me what my research is about, I tend to answer “human culture” or “cultural evolution”, I think I have to take this challenge quite seriously.

On one level, I agree completely with the answer: “culture” cannot be considered as an unproblematic explanation of any phenomenon. I was recently reflecting on the fact that, while I consider myself an atheist, I find it often unpleasant to hear – let alone pronounce – profanities. Rationally, I know that they are simply a series of sounds, but still I cannot avoid being annoyed. The imaginary naive anthropologist would say: of course, it is your culture! (I am Italian, and I received a then standard Catholic education). But this is exactly what we want to explain: why is this specific “cultural stuff” (being bothered by profanities) and not others (say going to church or pray) still present?

I think that every reader of this blog would agree that it is not useful to use culture as an explanation: we can not explain X (my problematic relationship with profanities, the readiness to perceive interpersonal threats in Southern USA, etc.) with “culture”. As Boyer writes in his answer, “that such processes could lead to roughly stable representations across large numbers of people is a wonderful, anti-entropic process that cries out for explanation”. However I feel like this is a starting point. I would be interested in X as a “cultural stuff”, and then try to explain it. Boyer and Tooby do not seem to agree: “culture”, in their view, is not just mistakenly used as an explanation. It is not a scientific concept at all…

[Dan Sperber in the comments] Culture is a property. What property? Take all practices, artefacts, mental states in a population over time that have some informational content. Ask how are their contents related? Well, they are all links in many causal chains where for an item to be a link in such a chain is to owe some of its content to having been at least partly caused by previous links in the chain. So in a chain of perfect copying, as exists now on the internet, each new token of, say, a given youtube video owes its whole content to the token that has been copied in producing it. In most cases however, in particular before the internet, items having informational content have a more complex informational aetiology, owing some of their content to one causal chain, some to another causal chain, and some to the more or less idiosyncratic process of their production in the mind or through the behaviour of one or several individuals. Take a very idiosyncratic item: someone’s original dream. Even that item owes quite a bit of its content to being a causal descendent of conversations, stories, images, and so on. It is cultural too. You get my point. The more an item gets its informational content from the causal chains in which it occurs, the more cultural it is. Note that to be 100% cultural in this way, it should typically owe all of its content to a single chain, otherwise the recombination itself is likely to involve some idiosyncratic construction.

More here.

Wesley Stace at The Times Literary Supplement:

Lydon the narrator is endlessly self-contradictory – there is no use criticizing the book on the basis of this essential component of his character. He is also abrasive, immodest, given to outlandish claims, prone to speaking about himself in the third person (“poor old Johnny Rotten”), and either very funny or mesmerizingly humourless. He seems to will misunderstanding, purely so he can complain about it, and is equally happy to speak ill of the dead and the living in his eternal battle over the soul of the Pistols. Occasionally, as the book goes on, he picks a fight with himself just to pass the time.

The tone changes when he writes tenderly, and uxoriously, of his wife, Nora, and extended family. Libraries have been another kind of saviour and there are paeans to Dickens, Wilde, Ted Hughes, Muriel Spark and John Keats. Punk did not brush away the musical past as its publicists have claimed, and Lydon emphasizes the musical continuum, praising influential musical acts from Can and Hawkwind, through Kool & the Gang, to Duran Duran and Depeche Mode. Of the Edgar Broughton Band, he wisely notes: “I don’t expect the music would bear up too much today, but that isn’t the be-all-and-end-all”.

It’s perhaps fitting that the career of Lydon, who undoubtedly sees himself as a force of nature, took a left turn when he became the presenter of “extreme” nature programmes, including John Lydon’s Megabugs and John Lydon Goes Ape. During the filming of the latter, he finally met his match: “You can not train [gorillas], they will not have it . . . But then I’m untrainable too”.

more here.

Joshua Rothman at The New Yorker:

The three weirdest books I read last year were all by the same writer. His name is Jeff VanderMeer, he’s from Tallahassee, Florida, and he’s the King of Weird Fiction. He writes in the genre—his 2009 novel “Finch” is a detective story, reminiscent of “Blade Runner,” set in a city divided between normal people and mushroom people—and he champions it: with his wife, the influential sci-fi and fantasy editor Ann VanderMeer, he’s edited the anthologies “The Weird” and “The New Weird.” It’s self-defeating, of course, to try and define weirdness (although VanderMeer has offered definitions). A lot of fiction, moreover, merely pretends to it, invoking its atmosphere without being, in fact, all that weird.

Still, when you’re in the presence of the genuine, uncanny article, you know. Stephen King is tremendously imaginative, but H. P. Lovecraft is weird; Kafka is probably the ultimate weird writer. In VanderMeer’s “Finch,” the mushroom people (“gray caps”) are people-shaped, and they can seem like character in an ordinary detective novel. (“You stupid fucking mushroom” a cop says while interrogating one of them. “Answer the question.”) But, standing next to one, you feel its “humid weight.” You can torture a mushroom person by pouring water on its head, but if you cut it into pieces it stays cold and dry.

more here.

August Kleinzahler at the London Review of Books:

Estes is identified with the photorealist school of painting. With their glossy, often hard finish, an almost enamelled quality, and photographic degree of verisimilitude, his work looks at home in that context. But it might be more useful to compare his pictures with those of the veduta painters of the 17th and 18th centuries, with Vermeer’s View of Delft and The Little Street, or the views of Venice by Canaletto and the Guardis. The Smithsonian exhibition includes two canvases of Venice from 1980, View towards La Salute, Venice and Accademia, Venice, that are reminiscent of 18th-century Venetian painters even if they show the buildings of the city reflected, multiplied and distorted by the glass windows of vaporetto stops. Piranesi’s detailed etchings of Rome – The Colosseum, for instance – seem a probable influence but Estes, who is most definite about his likes and especially his dislikes (Pop art is ‘silly’), regards drawings, etchings and lithographs as ‘incomplete’ because they are not coloured. As for his interest in reflection, it seems to have been ignited by the pictures he saw at the National Gallery during his travels as a young artist: small Turner watercolours ‘with distorted reflections in windows – or mirrors perhaps’, Van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Portrait, in which the mirror behind the couple reflects two figures at the door and The Rokeby Venus by Velásquez, in which she admires her own reflection in a mirror – all these pictures, Estes says, ‘seemed to open up a lot of possibilities for painting’.

more here.

Maggie Jones in the New York Times Magazine:

That night, Klunder and her friends passed plates of bibimbap (rice topped with meat and vegetables), soondubu jjigae (tofu stew) and pa jun (scallion pancake) around the table and ordered bottles of beer and soju. Everyone there was a member of Adoptee Solidarity Korea, or ASK. It was started as a reading group in 2004 by a handful of politically progressive Korean female adoptees (and one man) in their 30s, who began to discuss why Korean single mothers felt pressure to give away their children — 90 percent of those who place their children for adoption are not married. They talked about a culture in which single mothers are often ostracized, one in which employers typically ask women about their marital status in job interviews; parents sometimes reject daughters who raise their children alone; and the children of single mothers are often bullied in school. They also questioned why the government offered little aid to mothers to help keep their families intact. At an adoption conference organized a year after the group was created, members handed out fliers that read, in part, “ASK stands in opposition to international adoption.” They sold T-shirts, designed by Kimura Byol-Nathalie Lemoine, an early adoptee activist, that depicted a wailing baby with a large stamp on its rear end: “Made in Korea.”

Over time, ASK backed away from its message of ending adoption. It was too polarizing, adoptees said, and “hard for people to hear anything we said after the word ‘stop,' ” Jenny Na, one of the group’s founders, wrote in a history of ASK. But in recent years, members — along with other Korean adoptee activists — have built an improbable political campaign, lobbying for legislation that has helped reduce the flow of Korean children overseas. In the process, they have emerged as leaders in a movement to question the very concept of international adoption, one that has galvanized other adoptees around the world.

Read the rest here.

From The Guardian:

As a young writer growing up in Caserta, a suburb of Naples, I felt myself getting more and more angry. There was a war going on between two mafia clans for control of the territory, and violence between them spilled into the streets. I wanted to tell the world what this war zone was like: the victims’ families tearing their clothes, the stink of piss from a man who knew he was going to die and couldn’t control his fear, people shot in the street because they looked like the intended victim. I got to know the workers in industries run by the Camorra. I got to know the messengers, the look-outs who worked for the clan. I read court records, news reports, trial transcripts. I pulled their stories together, the stories of my neighbourhood, and published a book called Gomorrah. Something about it touched a nerve. It became an instant bestseller – so many people bought it that the Camorra couldn’t ignore it.

Not long after the book came out in 2006, someone left a leaflet in my mother’s postbox. I was living in Naples, but she was still in Caserta. It showed a photograph of me, with a pistol to my head, and the word “Condemned”. Soon afterwards, I was invited to give an address at a gala to inaugurate the new school year in the town of Casal di Principe, home of the most powerful Camorra clan, with one of the highest murder rates in Italy. I singled out the Camorra bosses from the stage, naming them publicly, which local people had been too intimidated to do. I told them they should leave. The then-speaker of the Italian parliament was there with his bodyguards. After the event, they told me it would be too dangerous to go back to Naples on public transport, so they took me with them. The following day the local paper denounced my intervention as an insult to the Camorra. A few days later, someone followed me on the street in Naples and got on the bus behind me. He said: “You know that they are going to make you pay for what you did in Casale [Casal di Principe], right?”

Less than a month after that, returning to Naples from a literary festival, I was met at the railway station by two carabinieri. As we drove away in an armoured car, they said they had been assigned to me for my protection.

More here.