Christopher Hitchens in Slate:
What impressed me about this masterly speech was not so much the case itself, with which I already agreed, but the “decent respect to the opinions of mankind” that it exemplified. A decision to resort to violence was not something to be undertaken without great care—and stated in terms that were addressed to reasonable people.
More here.
By some accounts, the first draft of Moby-Dick was a conventional sea story. Hawthorne encouraged him to develop such transcendent themes as obsession, anger, revenge, and lust. “Ah, God!” Melville writes in Moby-Dick, “What trances of torments does that man endure who is consumed with one unachieved revengeful desire. He sleeps with clenched hands; and wakes with his own bloody nails in his palms.” Presumably such passages were missing from the first draft, which was heavy with chapters that read like a textbook on cetology or a history of the whaling industry. The critic Leon Howard has written that the “excitement and enthusiasm aroused in him by Hawthorne belonged entirely to the period in which he was reworking Moby-Dick.” Hawthorne’s influence, late in the book, may also explain why the novel has the feel of two books in one: the conventional passages about the whaling industry, and the psychological drama of Ahab’s self-destruction. Ahab’s obsessions must have been conjured in Melville’s Arrowhead writing room. That legacy led me to the most perplexing aspect of the house tour: how Melville, so far from the sea, was able to imagine and write Moby-Dick in a room that looks out on Mount Greylock, the tallest peak in the Berkshires. It would be as if his contemporary, Honoré de Balzac, had written about Paris from a South Sea island. One explanation can be found in one of Melville’s letters to an editor friend, Evert Duyckinck: “I have a sort of sea-feeling here in the country, now that the ground is all covered with snow. I look out of my window in the morning when I rise as I would out of a port-hole in a ship in the Atlantic. My room seems a ship’s cabin; & at nights when I wake up & hear the winds shrieking, I almost fancy there is too much sail on the house, & I had better go on the roof & rig in the chimney.”
more from Matthew Stevenson at The Critical Flame here.
And marriage, as I have argued, has not been one unchanging institution over time. Features of marriage that once seemed essential and indispensable proved otherwise. The ending of coverture, the elimination of racial barriers to choice of partner, the expansion of grounds for divorce—though fiercely resisted by many when first introduced—have strengthened marriage rather than undermining it. The adaptability of marriage has preserved it. Marriage persists as simultaneously a public institution closely tied to the public good and a private relationship that serves and protects the two people who enter into it. That it remains a vital and relevant institution testifies to the law’s ability to recognize the need for change, rather than adhere rigidly to values or practices of earlier times. Enabling couples of the same sex to gain equal marriage rights would be consistent with the historical trend toward broadening access. It would make clearer that the right to marry represents a profound exercise of the individual liberty central to the American polity.
more from Nancy F. Cott at Boston Review here.
The mud in which we modern creatures—trying so hard, in all of our blindness, to find our modern lovers—are covered and buried must have been a theme that Hurston meditated on for years. Their Eyes Were Watching God was published a decade after “Monkey Junk,” but there’s already plenty of mud-slinging going on. At the end of “Monkey Junk,” the savvy city diva calls her ex a “hunk of mud” and tells him to go hang out with monkeys. She dismisses him coldly, in other words. She’s trying her best to dehumanize and demoralize him, to banish him from the place where the successful and the professional go to get out of the dirt. She’ll be earning a hundred “shekels” a month off the poor guy, so she can buy her silk drawers and hosiery in the “marketplace.” But Hurston seems to suggest that this diva has maligned her priorities, that her sense of value is skewed. She thinks, perhaps, the ease and comfort of the city has cleaned her of that mud and allowed her to gleam and shine, to become glossy and precious. But she still, apparently, has mud in her eyes, for she’s entirely missed the glimmer and glamour of her fellow. Perhaps all of her fellows. It’s a morality tale that seeks to expose the extent to which—in spite of the slick tricks of the city’s shop windows and lights—modern lovers are still (as they ever were) drowned in mud. They hunt and they hunt, but the mud keeps them from simply seeing each other’s glitter and flash, or hearing the weird little hum of that strange old love song as it plays on, and on.
more from Beatrice Marovich at Killing the Buddha here.
If
If you can disentangle
yourself from your selfish self
all heavenly spirits
will stand ready to serve you
if you can finally hunt down
your own beastly self
you have the right
to claim Solomon's kingdom
you are that blessed soul who
belongs to the garden of paradise
is it fair to let yourself
fall apart in a shattered house
you are the bird of happiness
in the magic of existence
what a pity when you let
yourself be chained and caged
but if you can break free
from this dark prison named body
soon you will see
you are the sage and the fountain of life
by Rumi
translation: Nader Khalili
Jennifer Howard in the Chronicle of Higher Education:
Readers outside academe caught on to Wallace before scholars did. When he died, academic interest in him had only begun to show real signs of life, with scholars starting to look closely at the ways in which Wallace responded to and reshaped for a new generation the postmodernism practiced by writers like Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon. Two years later, spurred in part by his death but even more by a rising generation of young scholars, the impending publication of a posthumous novel, and the opening of a major archive of the writer's papers, David Foster Wallace studies is on its way to becoming a robust scholarly enterprise.
More here.
Feisal H. Naqvi in Pakistan Today:
The standard jurisprudential response to my assertion is that society indeed has a right to determine what actions are to be treated as criminal, but only within certain rights provided by the fundamental human rights guaranteed by the Constitution. I concede that point, so let us then look at the next issue: is punishing blasphemy violative of fundamental human rights?
My answer is no. As much as I disagree with the blasphemy law, I do not think that criminalising the act of blasphemy is violative of any fundamental human rights guaranteed by the Constitution. All of those rights are subject to reasonable limitations. And in Pakistan – repeat, in this country – I do not think it is unreasonable for the law to provide that blasphemy shall be a criminal offence. Even in England, the last blasphemy prosecution took place not centuries ago, but in 1977.
Does that mean the blasphemy law cannot, or should not, be challenged or changed? Absolutely not. The blasphemy law, as it stands today, invites abuse and serves as a terrible instrument of oppression. But what it does mean is that the change must be brought about through political means, not legal. And politics, as we too often forget, is the art of the possible, not the art of the desirable.
There are three basic ways to attack the blasphemy law. The first…
More here.
From The Telegraph:
Elaine’s has been referred to as a salon/saloon, and the combined image that conjures up of Gertrude Stein and John Wayne was as good a first impression of Elaine Kaufman as any. George Plimpton, editor in chief of the Paris Review, once said fondly that “she has the fastest knee in town and she knows where to put it”. Years earlier, she had spent the night in jail after slugging an unwelcome customer and cutting his cheek with her large gold rings. Elaine’s antics were part of the draw; a famous New Yorker cartoon features a couple entering the restaurant as a man rockets headlong out of the front window, with the caption: “Oh, good. Room just opened up at the bar.” New York magazine celebrated the place’s 20th anniversary in 1983 with an article headlined: “If you’ve been too afraid to go to Elaine’s for the past 20 years, here’s what you’ve missed”.
More here.
From The New York Times:
Yet the episode has inflamed one of the longest-running debates in science. For decades, some statisticians have argued that the standard technique used to analyze data in much of social science and medicine overstates many study findings — often by a lot. As a result, these experts say, the literature is littered with positive findings that do not pan out: “effective” therapies that are no better than a placebo; slight biases that do not affect behavior; brain-imaging correlations that are meaningless.
More here.
by Tom Jacobs
To the type of person who is given to free ranging, loosely analytical reflections upon all the strange things that the world casts is his way, who finds himself attracted to strange little disturbances in the otherwise smooth surfaces of everyday life (things like the creative defacement of public advertisements, unpicked up dog poo on the sidewalk, the strange guy on the subway, the unexpected pattern of ice crystals on my kitchen window, and so forth), these bathroom screws have been a point of particular and considerable interest. What, the querulous mind asks, do these screws assume? And what do they imply?
Walter Benjamin was excited by the prospects of applying historical-materialist (or “Marxist, really, I suppose) analysis to everyday life. He thought that one of the great challenges of the age (his age, which is still, in some sense, “our” age, even if the mechanics of reproduction have gone all ethereal and immaterial) was to “assemble large-scale constructions out of the smallest and most precisely cut components. Indeed, to discover in the analysis of the small individual moment the crystal of the total event.” What I take him to mean is something to the effect that we need to pay attention to how the little details of our experience can, if we pay proper attention to them, tell us something important about the larger world. These are what might be called “clues.”
A favorite professor (of sociology) once dropped this little iridescent observation in passing, which I immediately dutifully wrote down: “you can read a person’s class by paying attention to two things: their shoes and their watch.” These days, things have gotten much slipperier. No one wears a watch anymore, for one thing, unless out of affectation or nostalgia. And shoes? Well, rich people frequently pursue the shabby chic look while the impoverished seek to conspicuously display outward signs that they are not impoverished (I count myself among the latter, by the way…the shoes that I am now wearing I bought for ten bucks at a thrift store in Lincoln, Nebraska…these lovely suede buckskins are way above my pay grade, but you’d never know it.)
The literature of detection is inherently interesting because it hinges upon this fuzzy, slippery dimension of everyday life: that it is still possible to read the macro in the micro, to see in “the small individual moment the crystal of the total event.” This sort of thing relies upon the notion that there is a stable and coherent social order against which one can read a given particular clue. If, for instance, you lived in England during the Victorian age, you could pretty safely assume that someone sporting a tan had, in all likelihood been in the South at some point. Possibly India. Possibly in a military or civil/administrative capacity. So suddenly you know a fair amount about this stranger. There’s just no other way to obtain a tan. Callouses on your hands meant that you were a laborer.
Book Review: It’s Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistleblower, Michela Wrong (HarperCollins, 354pp, 2009)
by Edward B. Rackley
Returning in 2007 after two years in hiding, Githongo watches Kenya plunge into a fratricidal abyss following botched national elections. Waves of inter-ethnic violence push Kenya to the brink, with much of the bloodshed fomented by political elites, six of whom are now wanted by the International Criminal Court. That political violence between ethnic communities was not caused by tribalism, as many outside observers believe, but was a direct result of state-sponsored corruption is the deep water current in this book.
Michela Wrong has written two previous accounts of visionary leaders gone mad; the first on Mobutu, ‘Le Roi du Zaire’ (In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu’s Congo), the second on post-independence Eritrea (I Didn’t Do It for You: How the World Betrayed a Small African Nation). How the poorest pay the price for their country’s corrupt leadership is a recurring theme, but It’s Our Turn to Eat stands above her previous work thanks to the author’s friendship with the protagonist and proximity to his plight. Wrong risked her own safety by sheltering Githongo when he first landed in England.
The result is a distinctly personal portrayal of Githongo’s psychological makeup and his inner conflict between principle and belonging, Kenyan citizen and Kikuyu brother, as the scams reveal themselves and relations with Kibaki, initially an advocate of accountability, grow tenuous and distant. Readers will visualize a film adaptation of this thriller that, unlike John LeCarre’s The Constant Gardener, casts Africans as crusaders risking life and limb to reset the course of wayward leaders.
Githongo’s principled resistance reads at first like a dream-come-true for practitioners like myself who work in public sector reform, demand-driven accountability and anti-corruption in developing countries. The portrait of Githongo the man is fascinating and helps answer the perennial question – “Who in this country can lead real reform?” But by the end of the story, we see Githongo alone, tilting at windmills and abandoned by the global aid industry that initially championed his cause.
The closing chapters are devoted to teasing out the motivations behind donor silence, a passivity that Wrong, along with most average Kenyans, finds indistinguishable from complicity. And what of local opposition to corruption and tribalism’s destructiveness, why its seeming absence from the national psyche? Wrong has answers to that question too.
Of course, modern-day Gazans live in nothing like the splendour of their Bronze Age, Roman or Ayyubid counterparts, and farmers and fishermen are among the poorest. Despite fertile soils and a (usually) clement climate, they are handicapped by the continuing Israeli occupation of the coastal enclave. Free-fire zones on land and sea prevent farmers from reaching 35% of the remaining arable land and fishermen from accessing 85% of their fishing grounds. Until June, when the deaths of nine Turkish activists attempting to reach Gaza by sea sparked international outrage, Israel imposed a sanctions regime harsher than any in force anywhere else in the world, including Burma and North Korea. Three lost winters for cash crops (including Gaza’s famous strawberries) crippled the once-thriving export industry, while production for the domestic market foundered for the lack of basic inputs such as insect-proof mesh, water pumps and greenhouse plastic. Although the blockade has been partially eased, gaps are still being filled by imports through the tunnels along the Egyptian border, including of unvaccinated cattle originating in countries where diseases like East Coast fever are rife.
The shortage of water also causes animals to sicken, with kidney diseases in ruminants on the rise thanks to the salinisation of the aquifer. Abstraction of water stands at around 200% of the annual recharge capacity, leaving less than 10% of Gaza’s water potable. Cruelly, it barely rained at all during the recent storm: this is the fourth consecutive year of below average rainfall, and the worst so far. Winter vegetables may not be grown at all in some areas. Finally (if you haven’t yet switched off), mention must be made of the dreaded tomato leaf miner, tuta absoluta, which has been munching its way through Gaza’s tomatoes since arriving in the Strip in 2010, and which could move onto sweet peppers, chillies, aubergines and potatoes if it gets really hungry. The woeful state of Gaza’s greenhouses caused by blockade and bombardment allowed the infestation to take hold, and the storm means that at least 3,000 will need insect-proofing again.
I anticipate that readers may well have switched off by this stage, because the only thing that seems to come out of Gaza is bad news.
I could add to this litany of woes for several more paragraphs (although foolishly I signed up to these Monday Columns using my real name, so don’t expect too many pearls of wisdom about the UN, the Palestinian Authority or Hamas), but most people already know that life for the 1.6 million people of Gaza is tough. Over 70% are dependent on external assistance, and each square kilometre contains an average of around 4,400 people. (For comparison, if you moved the entire population of the world to Mexico, it would be 20% less densely populated. Now try feeding everybody…) However, other people’s problems are never as interesting as our own, especially if they have been going on for a long time, and in any case I already spend a good deal of time talking about Gaza’s woes to an increasingly-fatigued donor community.
What you may find interesting, however, are the small pinpricks of good news that I come across in the course of my work.
Neural networks typically consist of a number of simple information processing units (the “neurons”). Each neuron combines a number of inputs (some or all of which come from other neurons) to give an output, which is then typically used as input to other neurons in the network. The connections between neurons normally have weights, which determine the strength of the effect of the neurons on each other. So, for example, a simple neuron could sum up all its inputs weighted by the connection strengths and give an output of 0 or 1 depending on whether this sum is below or above some threshold. This output then functions as an input to other neurons, with appropriate weights for each connection.
A computation involves transforming some stream of input into some stream of output. For example, the input stream might be a list of numbers that come into the network one by one, and the desired output stream might be the squares of those numbers. Some or all of the neurons receive the input through connections just like those between neurons. The output stream is taken to be the output of some particular set of neurons in the network. The network can be programmed to do a particular transformation (“trained”) by adjusting the strengths of connections between different neurons and between the inputs and the neurons. Typically this is done before the network is used to process the desired input, but sometimes the connection weights are changed according to some pre-determined rule as the network processes input.
By Liam Heneghan
[This is the first in an occasional series of pieces on the philosophy of science.]
In the guestbook of a flower shop near my Evanston, Illinois home, a few blocks west of Lake Michigan – that body of water which serves as a sea for those born far from the brinier fluids of a true ocean – I observed the tiny carcass of an insect compressed upon the page, beneath a comment that read, “Yellow roses are the gift of cowards, Carl.” Intriguing. Its antennae were shaped like little Christmas trees, an anatomical curiosity permitting many people, I expect, to readily identify the fly as a chironomid midge, a fly hatched from a larva that lived in the lake’s proximate substrate, whose pupating body rose at some late life-stage and floated upon the surface of the waters, whose pupal exuvium sloughed off like the skin of a small but darkly-meated banana, and which then, as an adult, rose again to swarm as part of a male-only congregation waiting for a mate to flit along. Chironomid males, recall, have those telltale plumose antennae which act as a delicate sexual nose of sorts, to detect the presence of female flies. The ephemeral and outlandishly sexual nature of their adult lives is underscored by the fact that they do not feed, being equipped with a greatly reduced feeding apparatus. This much is well enough known; a well-informed school-child will elaborate on the matter. What
I qualified as a zoologist at University College Dublin, getting a master’s degree for work on chironmids that I collected in Irish National Parks in 1987, having completed my bachelor’s work the year before. I eventually earned my PhD there in 1994. A rigorous education. In our Irish system a young person shows up at university at seventeen or eighteen years of age, knowing, it is assumed, exactly what subject matters they expect to devote a lifetime of work to. Choosing, in my case, the natural sciences, I was educated in these sciences: all other domains of knowledge were excluded. I was taught (eclectically) across four science sub-disciplines in my first year, in my second specializing in three, in my third year, two, and yes in my last year I honed my skills as a zoologist taking a suite of specialist courses and undertaking a year-long research project on the systematics of a genus of chironomid midges, the Thienemannimyia group. The task: to unravel the phylogenetic (roughly evolutionary) relationships between the numerous species in the group.
At the V&A until 20th February 2011
www.vam.ac.uk/shadowcatchers
Sponsored by Barclays Wealth
by Sue Hubbard
From 1834 William Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) created ‘sciagrphaphs’ (the depiction of shadows) and ‘photogenic drawings’ using botanical specimens and lace placed on sensitized paper. These spectral images implicitly posed questions about the nature of reality. The term for all such works is a ‘photogram’, though strictly speaking they do not depict shadows as they are caused by the blocking of light rather than by a cast shadow. The photogram was later usurped by the process of projecting negatives through an enlarger lens. In an increasingly mechanist age this new technology proved more seductive to the scientifically minded Victorians than camera-less photography, which became the idiosyncratic realm of those interested in exploring the subconscious and the so-called spirit world. The playwright August Strindberg took to leaving sheets of photographic paper in developer exposed to the night sky, believing that his resulting ‘celestographs’ were caused by this exposure to the heavens rather than to the more prosaic explanation of dust collecting on the surface of the paper. In 1895 the previously unwitnessed interior of the human body was revealed by Wilhelm Konrad von Röntgen’s newly discovered x-rays, mirroring a growing interest in the unconscious and the revelation of that which could not be seen by the naked eye.
During the 1920s the photogram was rediscovered by a number of modern artists, particularly the Dadaists. Man Ray and László Moholy-Nagy were both attracted by its automatic qualities and the possible patterns of light that could be developed on sensitised paper without the use of any apparatus. László Moholy-Nagy wrote: “The photogram opens up perspectives of a hitherto wholly unknown morphosis governed by optical laws peculiar to itself. It is the most completely dematerialized medium which the new vision commands”. In 1937 his move to Chicago, to teach at the New Bauhaus, ensured that an interest in camera-less photography was transported across the Atlantic.
During the Second World War the role of documentary photography, with its ability to act as a witness to unpalatable truths and humanitarian concerns, became ever more important. In 1947 Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger and David “Chim” Seymour – photographers who had all been very much affected by what they had witnessed during the conflict – began the photographic agency Magnum, leaving the more experimental practice of camera-less techniques to the fringes of fine art practice. Now the V&A have mounted an intriguing exhibition entitled Shadow Catchers , the first UK museum exhibition of the work by contemporary camera-less photographers that includes Pierre Cordier (Belgium), Floris Neusüss (Germany), Susan Derges and Garry Fabian Miller (UK) and Adam Fuss (UK/USA).
[Photo credit: Floris Neusüss, Untitled, (Körperfotogramm), Berlin, 1962, Collection Chistian Diener, Berlin, ©Courtesy of Floris Neusüss.]
This February, NewSouth Books will publish “Tom Sawyer” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” in a single volume, removing the “n” word and the word “injun” from the text. The word “slave” will replace the “n” word.
Mark Twain must be twirling in his grave.
Last year 2010 marked the 175th anniversary of his birth, the 100th anniversary of his death and the 125th anniversary of the American publication of “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”
This book “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” is, as Lionel Trilling said, was “America's most eloquent argument against racism.”
If you never read it, don't wait for some instructor to force you.
As Twain himself said, “I never let schooling interfere with my education.”
But let’s look at what else we can “hear” from Twain, the First Great, Internationally Famous California Writer.
Oh yeah. Mark Twain was a California writer.
Listen to the Voice in this 1865 yarn, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” his earliest success.
“I'll risk forty dollars that he can outjump any frog in Calaveras county.”
And later …
“I don't see no p'ints about that frog that's any better'n any other frog.”
The Jumping Frog was the first California International Best-seller. It made Twain famous. The story was spawned in the Gold Country. It traveled the world.
The story is about a con man getting conned. And what could be more All American?
Mark Twain said about the American art …
“To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities, is the basis of the American art, if my position is correct.”
Yes, he was the first great California writer. Hard to believe, yes.
“No good movie is too long,” Roger Ebert once wrote, “and no bad movie is short enough.” Oh, how my inner cinephile regrets bringing up the 201-minute length of Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles so early in the discussion, it supports that dictum so well! Later revised to “All good films are the right length,” the line now applies to the film that much more directly. I'll sound higher-flown but surely even more accurate when I claim that the form of all good movies closely fits their substance. Here we have one of the closest form-substance matches ever made.
The title may have already given this away, but those three-and-change hours don't serve a labyrinthine plot, an ensemble of dozens, or any particular historical sweep; we get a widow, her son, three days in mid-1970s Brussels, and the preparations for those days' three dinners. Already we hit the fearsome wall this film raises against critics: having watched (and perhaps loved) it, you want to insist that, against the implication of all possible summaries, it's not boring. Yet that insistence sounds, to the rightfully skeptical reader, like too much protestation. What's more, you feel all the while that the very impulse to deliberately highlight non-boringness trivializes the many fascinating (and actually relevant) qualities of a picture so richly non-boring on every level. It's like making a big deal out of the fact that it was shot with a camera; sure, it's true, but it's also part of the work's very nature.
Generally speaking, no serious viewer considers boredom a function of length. After all, many boring movies clock in around 90 minutes, and often they're filled with event after tiresome event. Neither, then, can a serious viewer consider boredom a function of happenings. Let's not even start on all the turgid “epics” the annals of cinema history offer us. I would submit that boredom is actually the result of a form-substance mismatch; it's the unpleasant sensation of those two aspects of a film grinding away at one another, rattling, vibrating, putting out that awful burning-rubber smell. Hence the dullness of so many films adapted from other media — literature especially — as well as those conceived first and foremost as screenplays. When the material can't properly engage all the creative bandwidth cinema has to offer, something's bound to burn out. Usually, it's the audience.
Having said that, I'll tell you what happens in Jeanne Dielman. Bear with me. The titular widow's precisely scheduled days have her cooking breakfast, polishing shoes, buying ingredients, preparing impressively bland dinners out of those ingredients, eating those dinners in near-silence with her son Sylvain, reading letters from relatives in Canada, and unfolding and refolding the sofa bed. Each afternoon, she makes the time to let a different man in the front door, take him into the bedroom, and not come out until the sun sets. It's not altogether clear at first what's going on with that last bit, though Jeanne does drop a few bills into a jar on the dining table after each visit.
“A-ha,” you might say to yourself as the first day ends. “The loss of her husband has forced this poor single mother into prostitution!” To be sure, nothing in the film refutes that interpretation, but almost everything in the film hints at a deeper, stranger, far less identifiable depravity. If you're looking for indicators of homes in chaos, mothers selling sex would seem promising, yet Jeanne, whose face at certain angles looks like a death mask of domestic efficiency, could hardly have regimented her household further. Each weeknight has its dinner — Wednesdays are veal — from which there can be no deviation. Jeanne and Sylvain step out of the apartment and into town at the same time every evening. That cleanliness reigns goes without saying; even right after seeing a “client,” Jeanne takes a bath that would do an obsessive-compulsive proud.
Why Do We Have Heads At All?
—on Daniel Lieberman’s The Evolution of the Human Head
“The head presents an evolutionary paradox,”
says Lieberman, “The roof of the orbits
is the floor of the brain.” And I imagine a room
in which a miracle sponge sits soaking up
what it means to be alive while other skulls
orbit this particular one which,
a la Ptolemy, imagines it’s a sun
This head’s tenant thinks it knows
something of the world. It sits in its domed room
sometimes as if it were a church in a cloister
somewhere emanating wishes. It wonders if
somehow it'll ever change its world. It hopes that
someday all sapient heads will in
some way plumb the paradox, lay it bare, and
sum up what they find in pithy words without in
any way diminishing the comfort of brain's appendages
“I’m not ready to ditch fossil fuels, and war's good for business,” says Id.
“Why does the head look the way it does,” asks Lieberman?
“Why do we have heads at all,” asks Jim?
by Jim Culleny, 1/9/11
In the third week of November in 2004, I dialed up to the Internet on a cellphone for the first time, then actively searched for blogs to read and bookmark. Though six years have passed, I clearly recall the first post I read through on 3quarksdaily.com. It was this one, a brief report after a trip to Karachi by Abbas Raza.
For disparate reasons (which might become clearer in future columns) the post struck some chords with me. I felt immediately sympathetic to the author and his viewpoint – a feeling since reinforced by years of devoted reading of this blog – and I was also immediately touched by his recollection of a lost “culturally diverse, tolerant, and progressive” Karachi.
Now, it is true that I have never been to Karachi. But bizarre as it may seem to many of you, large numbers of Goans cherish their connections to the city. This is because from 1850 or so, it was where we made good in numbers.
Meet May Cordeiro (b.1912), sitting with poise between her much-older siblings. She will describe herself all through her life as a Karachi girl, and will assume a lifelong posture of disdain towards everyone who comes from everywhere else.
The Cordeiro family came to Karachi from Saligao, a modest village in Goa which has never been reknowned for agriculture or natural beauty or anything similar. Instead, Saligao has distinguished itself by exporting people.
