Vijay Prasad in CounterPunch:

The Arab Revolt of 2011 is unabated. Protests continue in such unlikely places as Bahrain. On Valentine’s Day, a protest march in Manama had no love for the al-Khalifah royals. It wanted to deliver its message. “Our demand is a constitution written by the people,” the protestors chanted. Opposition leader Abdul Wahab Hussain told the press, “The number of riot police is huge, but we have shown using violence against us only makes us stronger.” The police fired rubber bullets and dispersed the as yet small crowd. “This is just the beginning,” Hussain said after he had been beaten off the streets.

Such protests appear unlikely only because the wave of struggle that broke out in the late 1950s and peaked in the 1970s was crushed by the early 1980s. Encouraged by the overthrow of the monarch in Egypt by the coup led by Gamal Abdel Nasser, ordinary people across the Arab world wanted their own revolts. Iraq and Lebanon followed. On the peninsula, the people wanted what Fred Halliday called “Arabia without Sultans.” The People’s Front for the Liberation of the Occupied Arab Gulf emerged out of the Dhofar (Oman) struggle. It wished to take its local campaign to the entire peninsula. In Bahrain, its more timid branch was the Popular Front. It did not last long. With Nasserism in decline by the 1970s, the new momentum came to this Arabian republicanism from the Iranian Revolution of 1979. The Islamic Front of the Liberation of Bahrain attempted a coup in 1981. They had the inspiration, but not the organization. This Arab archipelago could not go the way of Yemen, where a revolution allowed a Marxist organization to seize power in 1967.

More here.

In Guernica:

In November 2010, following a public speech she had made on the freedom struggle in Kashmir, a case of sedition was threatened against Roy. Several prominent members of the educated middle class in India spoke up on Roy’s behalf but a sizable section of this liberal set made it clear that their support of Roy was a support for the right to free speech, not for her views. What is it about Roy that so irks the Indian middle-class and elite? Is it the fact that she has no truck with the sober, scholarly, Brahmanical discourse of the respectable middle-of-the-road protectors of the status-quo? Her critics, among whom are some of my friends, are also serious people. But their objections appear hollow to me because they have never courted unpopularity. They air their opinions in op-eds, dine at the corporate table, are fêted on national TV, and collect followers on Twitter. They don’t have to face court orders. Naturally, I wanted to ask Roy whether she feels estranged from the people around her. She does, but also not. Her point is, which people? A bit melodramatically, I asked, “Are you lonely?” Roy’s wonderfully self-confident response: “If I were lonely, I’d be doing something else. But I’m not. I deploy my writing from the heart of the crowd.”

When I sat down for dinner with her I noticed the pile of papers on the far end of the wooden table. These were legal charges filed against Roy because of her statements against Indian state atrocities. Roy said to me, “These are our paper napkins these days.” What toll had these trials taken on her writing? Was her activism a source of a new political imagining or was her political experience one of loneliness and exile in her own land? What would be the shape of any new fiction she would write? These and other questions were on my mind when I began an exchange with Roy by email and then met with her twice at her home in Delhi in mid-January.

Guernica: Before we begin, can you give me an example of a stupid question you are asked at interviews?

Arundhati Roy: It is difficult to answer extremely stupid questions. Very, very, difficult. Stupidity defeats you in some way. Especially when time is at a premium. And sometimes these questions are themselves mischievous.

Guernica: Give me an example.

Arundhati Roy: “The Maoists are blowing up schools and killing children. Do you approve? Is it right to kill children?” Where do you start?

More here.

Garry Kasparov reviews Frank Brady's Endgame: Bobby Fischer’s Remarkable Rise and Fall—from America’s Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness:

It would be impossible for me to write dispassionately about Bobby Fischer even if I were to try. I was born the year he achieved a perfect score at the US Championship in 1963, eleven wins with no losses or draws. He was only twenty at that point but it had been obvious for years that he was destined to become a legendary figure. His book My 60 Memorable Games was one of my earliest and most treasured chess possessions. When Fischer took the world championship crown from my countryman Boris Spassky in 1972 I was already a strong club player following every move as it came in from Reykjavík. The American had crushed two other Soviet grandmasters en route to the title match, but there were many in the USSR who quietly admired his brash individuality along with his amazing talent.

I dreamed of playing Fischer one day, and we eventually did become competitors after a fashion, though in the history books and not across the chessboard. He left competitive chess in 1975, walking away from the title he coveted so dearly his entire life. Ten more years passed before I took the title from Fischer’s successor, Anatoly Karpov, but rarely did an interviewer miss a chance to bring up Fischer’s name to me. “Would you beat Fischer?” “Would you play Fischer if he came back?” “Do you know where Bobby Fischer is?”

Occasionally I felt as though I were playing a one-sided match against a phantasm. Nobody knew where Fischer was, or if he, still the most famous chess player in the world at the time, was out there plotting a comeback. After all, at forty-two in 1985 he was still much younger than two of the players I had just faced in the world championship qualification matches. But thirteen years away from the board is a long time. As for playing him, I suppose I would have liked my chances and I said as much, but how can you play a myth? I had Karpov to worry about, and he was no ghost. Chess had moved on without the great Bobby, even if many in the chess world had not.

David Grossman is the Israeli writer of the hour. Although a celebrated novelist, he is also a distinguished journalist who, over the last 30 years, has written steadily in newspapers and magazines in response to almost every social and political event of any size or significance that has taken place in his country. The difference between the story-telling Grossman and the essayistic Grossman is instructive. In 1987 Grossman wrote The Yellow Wind, a journalistic account of three months spent in the West Bank, where he looked hard at Palestinian life under the Israeli occupation. Until that time, he had lived all of his 33 years in Jerusalem. By his own admission, when he looked at an Arab he saw not a fellow creature; he saw only an Arab. Those three months in the West Bank radicalized him. When, upon its publication, I read the book, it reminded me of books that had been written by white, middle-class American kids who’d gone south in the ’60s to discover for themselves what it really meant to be black in America.

more from Vivian Gornick at Boston Review here.

W.G. Sebald’s long poem Nach der Natur (1988) contributed significantly to the swift recognition of his literary talent among fellow writers and poets, yet it received scant attention by the larger public and literary scholars alike.1 To the English-speaking world it was not even available until 2002, a year after its author’s death, when it appeared in Michael Hamburger’s excellent translation under the title After Nature. Like a triptych, it is divided into three untitled parts, each with a distinct thematic concern involving a specific historical period and a writer or artist: the first focuses on the Renaissance painter Matthias Grünewald, the second on the eighteenth-century naturalist, travel writer, and Arctic explorer Georg Wilhelm Steller, and the last on elements from Sebald’s own biography.2 As opposed to Sebald’s later practice, apart from the landscape photographs that are reproduced on the end sheets of the first edition of Nach der Natur, there are no visuals in the volume, although paintings play a prominent role, especially in the first and final sections of the poem. In what follows, I shall support my reading of Sebald’s poem with reproductions of Grünewald’s paintings. I do so, however, in an attempt to provide a glossary, and I do not want to confuse this with Sebald’s own, later practice of including visuals in his texts.

more from Dorothea von Mücke at Nonsite here.

more from Frédéric Chaubin at The Guardian here.

From EmersonKent.com

Robert C. Weaver's The Negro as an American speech, delivered at Chicago, Illinois — June 13, 1963.

When the average well-informed and well-intentioned white American discusses the issue of race with his Negro counterpart there are many areas of agreement. There are also certain significant areas of disagreement. Negro Americans usually feel that whites exaggerate progress; while whites frequently feel that Negroes minimize gains. Then there are differences relative to the responsibility of Negro leadership. It is in these areas of dispute that some of the most subtle and revealing aspects of white-white relationships reside. And it is to the subtle and less obvious aspects of this problem that I wish to direct my remarks.

Most middle-class white Americans frequently ask, “Why do Negroes push so? They have made phenomenal progress in 100 years of freedom, so why don't their leaders do something about the crime rate and illegitimacy?” To them I would reply that when Negroes press for full equality now they are behaving as all other Americans would under similar circumstances. Every American has the right to be treated as a human being and striving for human dignity is a national characteristic. Also, there is nothing inconsistent in such action and realistic self-appraisal. Indeed, as I shall develop, self-help programs among non-whites, if they are to be effective, must go hand-in-glove with the opening of new opportunities. Negroes who are constantly confronted or threatened by discrimination and inequality articulate a sense of outrage. Many react with hostility, sometimes translating their feelings into overt anti-social actions. In parts of the Negro community a separate culture with deviant values develops. To the members of this subculture I would observe that ours is a middle-class society and those who fail to evidence most of its values and behavior are headed toward difficulties. But I am reminded that the rewards for those who do are often minimal, providing insufficient inducement for large numbers to emulate them.

More here.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

The old models by which newspapers once thrived no longer seem viable. The new models have yet to be born. Media guru Clay Shirky and others have reminded us that the media landscape that held sway over the last century was something of an historical accident. High ideals aside, newspapers were a business. They had to make money. Think of William Randolph Hearst. The great newspapers made money, primarily, through advertising. The publishers needed journalism to provide the content through which they could fill up the non-advertising space of their newspapers. A symbiotic relationship was formed. As Shirky summarizes it:

The high expense of printing has created an environment where Wal-Mart is essentially subsidizing the Baghdad bureau. This isn’t because of any deep link between advertising and reporting, nor is it about any real desire on the part of Wal-Mart to have their marketing budget go to international correspondents. It was just an accident of economics. Advertisers had little choice other than to have their money used that way, since they didn’t have any other vehicle for display ads.

One of the big questions, then, is who is going to pay for all the investigative reporting and in-depth analysis that used to get paid for by the big media giants and their advertisers? The quick answer is that no one has any idea. But there is another answer, temporary and partial as it may be. It is called Al Jazeera.

More here.

Blizzard

Daniel Stolte in Physorg.com:

University of Arizona researchers have cracked one of the puzzles surrounding what has been called “the world's most mysterious manuscript” – the Voynich manuscript, a book filled with drawings and writings nobody has been able to make sense of to this day.

Using radiocarbon dating, a team led by Greg Hodgins in the UA's department of physics has found the manuscript's parchment pages date back to the early 15th century, making the book a century older than scholars had previously thought.

This tome makes the “DaVinci Code” look downright lackluster: Rows of text scrawled on visibly aged parchment, flowing around intricately drawn illustrations depicting plants, astronomical charts and human figures bathing in – perhaps – the fountain of youth. At first glance, the “Voynich manuscript” appears to be not unlike any other antique work of writing and drawing.

But a second, closer look reveals that nothing here is what it seems. Alien characters, some resembling Latin letters, others unlike anything used in any known language, are arranged into what appear to be words and sentences, except they don't resemble anything written – or read – by human beings.

More here.

Christopher Heaney in Not Even Past:

This weekend, as Cairo’s protestors struck their tents and tidied up Tahrir Square, a clean-up operation of another sort was underway nearby: in the Egyptian Museum, home to King Tutankhamen and countless other archaeological treasures.

The museum had haunted the protests since they began in late January. In the first few days of the unrest that toppled President Hosni Mubarak on Friday, newspapers were quick to note that a group of looters had broken through a skylight, apparently searching for gold. Although Tut’s famous mask was thankfully under lock-and-key, the intruders knocked over or damaged approximately 70 artifacts. In one of the many exciting turns of the last several weeks, however, Egyptian neighborhood patrols surrounded the museum and caught the would-be thieves.

“I’m standing here to defend and to protect our national treasure,” one man told the AP. “We are not like Baghdad!” shouted another. The looting of Iraq’s National Museum in 2003 was on every observer’s mind.

The Egyptian military arrived soon after, took the looters into custody and made the museum a base of operations. Just outside, Tahrir Square became the protests’ center. It seemed to be a victory for Egypt’s people and its military.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Imagine, Michael Chorost proposes, that four police officers on a drug raid are connected mentally in a way that allows them to sense what their colleagues are seeing and feeling. Tony Vittorio, the captain, is in the center room of the three-room drug den. He can sense that his partner Wilson, in the room on his left, is not feeling danger or arousal and thus has encountered no one. But suddenly Vittorio feels a distant thump on his chest. Sarsen, in the room on the right, has been hit with something, possibly a bullet fired from a gun with a silencer.

Vittorio glimpses a flickering image of a metallic barrel pointed at Sarsen, who is projecting overwhelming shock and alarm. By deducing how far Sarsen might have gone into the room and where the gunman is likely to be standing, Vittorio fires shots into the wall that will, at the very least, distract the gunman and allow Sarsen to shoot back. Sarsen is saved; the gunman is dead. That scene, from his new book, “World Wide Mind,” is an example of what Mr. Chorost sees as “the coming integration of humanity, machines, and the Internet.” The prediction is conceptually feasible, he tells us, something that technology does not yet permit but that breaks no known physical laws.

More here.

by Julia Galef

“One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don't know.”

–Groucho Marx

Like most jokes, Groucho’s works almost instantaneously. We hear the joke, we laugh, and we don’t need to think consciously about the process connecting those two points. But what if we played that process in slow motion?

Here’s a plausible account of what that might look like: the joke’s first sentence triggers an image, or at least a concept, of Groucho wearing pajamas and shooting an elephant. But the next phrase, “How he got in my pajamas,” doesn’t make sense in the framework of our current model of the situation, and we’re thrown into confusion. So we think, Hang on, I must’ve missed something, and we go back and re-evaluate the first sentence to see if there was some other, alternative way of interpreting it. Sure enough, now that we’re looking for it, there it is: an alternate meaning of “I shot an elephant in my pajamas” pops out, and you can almost hear the gears grinding as we shift from “I, in my pajamas, shot an elephant” to “I shot an elephant who was wearing my pajamas.”

Groucho’s joke is an example of paraprosdokia, a figure of speech whose latter half surprises us, forcing us to go back and reconsider the assumptions we’d made about what was going on in the first half. Other examples include Mitch Hedberg’s “I haven’t slept for two weeks — because that would be too long,” and Stephen Colbert’s “Now, if I am reading this graph correctly… I’d be very surprised.” The jolt of gratification we feel at converting confusion into clarity is exactly what Incongruity Resolution Theory, a popular theory in the psychological study of humor, predicts: humor is the satisfying “click” of an incongruity within the joke being resolved after you find the appropriate interpretive framework.

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