Lydia Polgreen in the NYT:

Twenty years ago, nearly 400,000 Hindus fled the Kashmir Valley, fearful of a separatist insurgency by the area’s Muslim majority. Now they are trickling back, a sign to many here that the Kashmir Valley, after years of violence and turmoil, is settling in to an uneasy but hopeful peace.

The valley’s upper-caste Hindus, Pandits as they are known, are reconnecting with their ancestral home, a few to stay and even larger numbers to visit. More than a dozen shrines have reopened in recent years, said Sanjay Tickoo, a Kashmiri Pandit who never left the valley and is now trying to entice those who left to return.

Their presence was once part of what made the Kashmir Valley a unique and idyllic patch of India, filled with apple orchards and shimmering fields of saffron framed by spiky, snow-capped peaks. A well-to-do but not overly powerful minority, the Pandits lived for centuries in relative harmony with their Muslim neighbors.

Kashmir’s mosaic of relatively peaceful coexistence first began to crack during the partition of British India, in 1947. But it was more than a decade of insurgency beginning in 1989 that turned the region into the battleground of the fierce rivalry between Hindu-majority India and Muslim-dominated Pakistan, who each control a portion of Kashmir.

Though not all fears or tensions from the past have dissipated, almost everyone here professes to want the Pandits to come back to the valley. Because they had lived here for generations, there is no sense that their return is intended to dilute the region’s Muslim majority.

“The overwhelming majority of Kashmiris believe the place is really incomplete without its diversity,” said Omar Abdullah, the chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir. “It is an important milestone in our return to normalcy if they begin to come back.”

M. L. Dhar, a 75-year-old Kashmiri Pandit who lives in a suburb of New Delhi, returned recently to Kashmir for the first time. He was astounded at the warm welcome he received from the valley’s Muslims.

Edmund White reviews Martin Amis' The Pregnant Widow, in the NYRB:

The Pregnant Widow begins as a beautifully poised, patient comedy of manners, in the tradition of the nineteenth- century English novels that Martin Amis’s college-age hero, Keith Nearing, is reading; then, in the last third, the narrative skips ahead and thins out and speeds up and starts to destroy itself joyously, like one of Jean Tinguely’s self-wrecking sculptures—or like civilization itself in the twenty-first century. It’s as if As You Like It, after carefully staging explorations of love and gender in a sylvan setting, were to knock itself out in a violent, messy, urban free-for-all right out of Animal House. In this respect alone I was reminded of Gravity’s Rainbow, in which the main theme, entropy, causes the book itself to give up on being, intermittently, a fairly traditional historical novel about World War II and to go to pieces, to run down, and the main character, Slothrop, to vanish.

Karl-Ludwig Günsche in Spiegel Online:

The façade of a country in a celebratory mood veils a nation that is actually festering, where people are sick and tired of being fobbed off with promise after empty promise. Labor leaders haven't been shy of threatening strikes during the World Cup. “Nobody must say 'Hold on, there are visitors around, don't do anything about this matter,'” Zwelinzima Vavi, who heads the Congress of South African Trade Unions, said last Thursday. “Our struggles … are bigger than the World Cup.”

Slum dwellers increasingly fight their fate. In Balfour they even shouted down Zuma, the former national hero. One in every two South Africans are unhappy with the public sector and the state's services, according to a survey by the TNS research institute. The ruling ANC party recently lost a ballot in the Western Cape for the first time, conceding their traditional stronghold to the opposition…

Ahead of next year's local elections, the ruling party is nervous, divided and embroiled in internal power struggles. The ANC leadership appears to have silenced the head of the Youth League, Julius Malema, whose hate speeches and chants fomented a climate of violence and racism. But his followers continue to pile on the pressure. Youth League functionary Loyiso Nkohla called on the ANC youth to devastate Cape Town and make it ungovernable. The mayor of the touristy city, Dan Plato, then called on Khayelitsha township residents to challenge the ANC youth with burning tires, an apartheid-period symbol of oppressive regimes. Amnesty International warned that the violent outbreaks could quickly escalate into xenophobic unrest.

From Prospect Magazine:

There is a pattern typical of these end-phase periods, when an artistic movement ossifies. At such times there is exaggeration and multiplication instead of development. A once new armoury of artistic concepts, processes, techniques and themes becomes an archive of formulae, quotations or paraphrasings, ultimately assuming the mode of self-parody.

Over the last decade, not only conceptualism—perhaps the dominant movement of the past three decades—but the entire modernist project has been going through a similar process. Of course, some important and inspired artists have made important and inspired work in recent years—from famous photographers like Andreas Gursky and painters like Luc Tuymans to lesser-known video artists like Lindsay Seers and Anri Sala. But there is something more fundamentally wrong with much of this century’s famous art than its absurd market value. I believe that this decline shares four aesthetic and ideological characteristics with the end-phases of previous grand styles: formulae for the creation of art; a narcissistic, self-reinforcing cult that elevates art and the artist over actual subjects and ideas; the return of sentiment; and the alibi of cynicism.

More here.

Via Andrew Sullivan:

Also, Saeed Kamali Dehghan on the filming of the documentary, in The Guardian. And here, a story on the Iranian regimes efforts to jam the documentary, also in the Guardian.

From The Guardian:

There is much speculation about the nature of the mind, its relation to the brain, even doubt that the word “mind” is meaningful. According to EO Wilson, “The brain and its satellite glands have now been probed to the point where no particular site remains that can reasonably be supposed to harbour a nonphysical mind”. Perhaps this statement is to be taken as tongue in cheek. But to prove a negative, or to treat it as having been proved, is, oddly enough, an old and essential strategy of positivism. So I do feel obliged to point out that if such a site could be found in the brain, then the mind would be physical in the same sense that anything else with a locus in the brain is physical. To define the mind as nonphysical in the first place clearly prejudices his conclusion. Steven Pinker, on the soul, asks, “How does the spook interact with solid matter? How does an ethereal nothing respond to flashes, pokes and beeps and get arms and legs to move? Another problem is the overwhelming evidence that the mind is the activity of the brain. The supposedly immaterial soul, we now know, can be bisected with a knife, altered by chemicals,” and so on. By identifying the soul with the mind, the mind with the brain, and noting the brain's vulnerability as a physical object, he feels he has debunked a conception of the soul that only those who find the word meaningless would ever have entertained.

This declension, from the ethereality of the mind/soul as spirit to the reality of the mind/brain as a lump of meat, is dependent, conceptually and for its effects, on precisely the antique dualism these writers who claim to speak for science believe they reject and refute. If complex life is the marvel we all say it is, quite possibly unique to this planet, then meat is, so to speak, that marvel in its incarnate form. It was dualism that pitted the spirit against the flesh, investing spirit with all that is lofty at the expense of flesh, which is by contrast understood as coarse and base. It only perpetuates dualist thinking to treat the physical as if it were in any way sufficiently described in disparaging terms. If the mind is the activity of the brain, this means only that the brain is capable of such lofty and astonishing things that their expression has been given the names mind, and soul, and spirit. Complex life may well be the wonder of the universe, and if it is, its status is not diminished by the fact that we can indeed bisect it, that we kill it routinely.

More here.

All the People Who Are Now Red Trees

When I see the red maple,
I think of a shoemaker
and a fish peddler
red as the leaves,
electrocuted by the state
of Massachusetts.

When I see the red maple,
I think of flamboyán's red flower,
two poets like flamboyán
chained at the wrist
for visions of San Juan Bay
without navy gunboats.

When I see flamboyán,
I think of my grandmother
and her name, Catalán for red,
a war in Spain
and nameless laborers
marching with broken rifles.

When I see my grandmother
and her name, Catalán for red,
I think of union organizers
in graves without headstones,
feeding the roots
of red trees.

When I stand on a mountain,
I can see the red trees of a century,
I think red leaves are the hands
of condemned anarchists, red flowers
the eyes and mouths of poets in chains,
red wreaths in the treetops to remember,

I see them raising branches
like broken rifles, all the people
who are now red trees.

by Martín Espada
from Touching the Fire
Anchor Books, 1998

The idea of evil, remarks Norwegian philosopher Lars Svendsen, has in recent decades been seen as “a holdover from a mythical, Christian worldview whose time had already passed”. But the fact that Svendsen’s A Philosophy of Evil is being published within weeks of literary critic Terry Eagleton’s On Evil and philosopher Tzvetan Todorov’s Memory as a Remedy for Evil suggests that the secular world is not quite ready to dispense with the concept of evil just yet. At the same time, a new reissue of theologian John Hick’s 1966 classic Evil and the God of Love shows there’s still life in the Christian perspective too. Perhaps this resurgence of interest is inevitable, for even though evil as an idea may have been out of fashion, as a reality it has never gone away. Attempts to do without the word in the face of genocide, torture and flagrant disregard for life, collapse into euphemistic absurdity. But what exactly is evil? Hick adopts the standard theological distinction between the natural evil that arises independently of human action, such as earthquakes and pestilence; the moral evil that is the result of human action; and the metaphysical evil that inevitably results from a finite and hence imperfect universe.

more from Julian Baggini at the FT here.

In chronicling his crippling attempts to read the great authors, keep up with the newest radical-highbrow scholarship and mingle with the social elite — all at the same time — Krim produced one of the great anti-intellectual screeds of his time. Coming on like Kerouac, he indicted the spokesmen of his age for using “too many words to say too few things that matter today to life-bombed kids.” The work of becoming an intellectual was fraught with peril; Krim was devoured by the “anxiety of influence” years before Harold Bloom popularized the term. “I knew gifted, fresh, swinging writers who told me in moments of confidence that they knew they weren’t ‘great’ or ‘major,’ ” he wrote, “and their voices were futile with flat tone when they confessed to this supposed weakness: as if the personal horn each could blow was meaningless because history wasn’t going to faint over them. History, the god of my grotesque period, the pursued phantom, the ruby-circled mirror of our me-worshipping egos which made monomanical fanatics out of potentially decent men!”

more from Akiva Gottlieb at the LAT here.

There are any number of reasons you shouldn’t read “The Man Who Loved Children” this summer. It’s a novel, for one thing; and haven’t we all secretly sort of come to an agreement, in the last year or two or three, that novels belonged to the age of newspapers and are going the way of newspapers, only faster? As an old English professor friend of mine likes to say, novels are a curious moral case, in that we feel guilty about not reading more of them but also guilty about doing something as frivolous as reading them; and wouldn’t we all be better off with one less thing in the world to feel guilty about? To read “The Man Who Loved Children” would be an especially frivolous use of your time, since, even by novelistic standards, it’s about nothing of world-historical consequence. It’s about a family, and a very extreme and singular family at that, and the few parts of it that aren’t about this family are the least compelling parts. The novel is also rather long, sometimes repetitious and undeniably slow in the middle. It requires you, moreover, to learn to read the family’s private language, a language created and imposed by the eponymous father, and though the learning curve is nowhere near as steep as with Joyce or Faulkner, you’re still basically being asked to learn a language good for absolutely nothing but enjoying this one particular book.

more from Jonathan Franzen at the NYT here.

From Guernica:

When Eva Illouz says passion depends upon scarcity, she does so with the best of intentions. Recently named one of the most important thinkers of the future by German newspaper Die Zeit, Illouz could very well be the twenty-first century’s next great public intellectual. And how did she become internationally popular? Instinct. In trying to get at what most irks her, she’s analyzed everything from love’s leap into leisure, to Freud’s popularity in the American workplace, to psychobabble as a new lingua franca. Historian? Philosopher? For lack of a better term, Illouz is a cultural theorist. Unlike other theorists, however, her ideas are more than just complex complaining; they are surprising and poignant, perhaps because all of her investigations come from the heart. Things get to her, or as she told me, they “trouble” her.

Take for example her reversal of the most basic Marxist precept. Any sixteen-year-old with a Che t-shirt will tell you: capitalism makes us robots. And yet, it doesn’t, Illouz thought. In fact, it does just the opposite. Our hypermodern lives are hyperemotional. It was then that Illouz began to trace back our obsession with feeling, which, according to her, began in the workplace, where surprisingly, Freud was used to better workers’ effectiveness. Soon, the early psychologist’s ideas spread to the private sections of our daily life, to the extent that now we can’t describe our lives without psychotherapy, as Illouz points out in her most recent book, Saving the Modern Soul: Therapy, Emotions, and the Culture of Self-Help. To explain our actions we have to hearken back to childhood memories and recognize emotional needs. She sees Howard Gardner’s concept of “emotional intelligence” as an extension of this psychological trend. What for Gardner is an aptitude for person-to-person response, Illouz sees the new calculating currency of advanced “emotional capitalism.”

More here.

From Scientific American:

The mysterious phenomenon known as quantum entanglement—where objects seemingly communicate at speeds faster than light to instantaneously influence one another, regardless of their distance apart—was famously dismissed by Einstein as “spooky action at a distance.” New experiments could soon answer skeptics by enabling people to see entangled pulses of light with the naked eye.

Although Einstein rebelled against the notion of quantum entanglement, scientists have repeatedly proved that measuring one of an entangled pair of objects, such as a photon, immediately affects its counterpart no matter how great their separation—theoretically. The current record distance is 144 kilometers, between the Canary Islands of La Palma and Tenerife.

More here.

Nathan Schneider interviews Eduardo Gonzalez, sociologist and the director of the Truth-Seeking Program at the International Center for Transitional Justice:

NS: You’ve described the truth commission process as, in some sense, a performance. What does it take to create a compelling, effective performance that is also an authoritative arbiter of truth?

EG: When I talk about a truth commission as a performance, that is not to suggest that it is some kind of fictional show. In fact, people opposed to truth commissions suggest just that. I prefer to talk about performance in a different way, referring to the language and codes utilized by victims to tell their stories. The language of victims, particularly those who come from marginalized groups, is rarely the language of the public sphere or the state. They do not typically come to a commission with written evidence or lawyerly arguments. The language of victims is oral and performative, transmitted through the family and the community. These performances may include storytelling, demonstrations, religious ceremonies, and vigils for those who were killed. Truth commissions need to provide an appropriate setting for people to channel those performances. We did that in Peru through public hearings, which I had a role in developing. The hearings were specifically designed to enable people to express their views in a way that they found appropriate, and that way was typically performative.

NS: What did you do to make the hearings more hospitable to these performances?

EG: Beforehand we examined videos of the Ghanaian, South African, and Nigerian truth commissions. We were pretty unsatisfied with what we saw. Truth commissions in those countries had decided to utilize the visual language of courts in order to gain credibility. A courtroom is supposed to convey majesty, authority, and impartiality. But we thought that if a truth commission is to take seriously the right to truth and the duty of memory, it needs to do everything differently. Rituals in a court of law revolve around the accused and the parties whose testimonies converge on the accused. The judge and/or the jury have the ever-present capacity for unleashing violence, because the end result of a trial can be a punishment. In a truth commission, however, the role of the commissioners is entirely different; they are presiding over a healing ritual for the victim. Their role is one of accompaniment, of support. For that reason, we had victims and commissioners sharing the same table. Instead of everyone standing up when the judge comes in, the commissioners and the public stood when a victim came in.

Henry Farrell reviews Fintan O’Toole’s Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger, in Washington Monthly:

Ireland’s economic problems started, like America’s, in the real estate market. Just as in the U.S., free-market ideology and comfortable relationships between businessmen and politicians encouraged the creation of a housing bubble. As a recent report by three National University of Ireland economists emphasizes, Ireland’s financial institutions did not fall prey to exotic financial instruments, but to lax regulation and bad business judgment. The report is tactfully silent regarding the reasons why Irish regulators made “obviously flawed” judgments, although its mention of the fact that “most large property developers in Ireland have been very closely connected to the ruling political party, Fianna Fáil,” offers some clues.

Political commentators may rush in where economists fear to tread. Fintan O’Toole is a longtime columnist for the Irish Times, and a relentless critic of Ireland’s altogether-too-comfortable relationship between business and politics. He is also a world-class cultural critic. His new book, Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger, an account of the facts of the Irish collapse, is excellent, crisp, and damning, but its real contribution is in explaining the cultural and political presuppositions that helped cause the crisis.

Both U.S. pundits and Irish politicians believed that Ireland was like a post-Reagan United States—and that this was a good thing. American commentators and politicians saw Ireland as an emerald-garbed Mini-Me, embodying U.S. values of free markets and minimal regulation. There was no shortage of American pundits willing to extol the Celtic Tiger. O’Toole singles out Benjamin Powell of the Cato Institute and Daniel Mitchell of the Heritage Foundation. He might equally have pointed to Thomas Friedman, who, in an unfortunately titled New York Times op-ed column, “Follow the Leapin’ Leprechaun,” informed continental European states that they either had to “become Ireland or … become museums.” John McCain made the even more absurd claim in a presidential debate that the U.S. needed to cut business taxes to Irish levels to stop firms from relocating elsewhere. Ireland had become so Americanized that America itself had to run to catch up.

Irish people too swallowed this codswallop. Deputy Prime Minister Mary Harney famously suggested that Ireland was spiritually closer to Boston than Berlin. Dublin audiences gaped at Michael Flatley’s dance spectacular The Celtic Tiger, which culminated with Cathleen ní Houlihan, William Butler Yeats’s embodiment of oppressed Ireland, performing a grotesque striptease to reveal bra and panties emblazoned with the Stars and Stripes.

This rhetoric of free-market empowerment reinforced long-standing problems of the Irish government.

[H/t: Mark Blyth]

Dust

Face powder, gun powder, talcum of anthrax,
shavings of steel, crematoria ash, chips
of crumbling poetry paper—all these in my lock-box,
and dust, tanks, tempests, temples of dust.

Saw-, silk-, chalk-dust and chaff,
the dust the drool of a bull swinging its head
as it dreams its death
slobs out on; dust even from that scoured,

scraped littoral of the Aegean,
troops streaming screaming across it
at those who that day, that age or forever
would be foe, worthy of being dust for.

Last, hovering dust of the harvest, brief
as the half-instant hitch in the flight
of the hawk, as the poplets of light
through the leaves of the bronzing maples.

Animal dust, mineral, mental, all hoarded
not in the jar of sexy Pandora, not
in the ark where the dust of the holy aspiring
to congeal as glorious mud-thing still writhes—

Just this leathery, crackled, obsolete box,
heart-sized or brain, rusted lock shattered,
hinge howling with glee to be lifted again . . .
Face powder, gun powder, dust, darling dust.

C.K. Williams
from Wait
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, NY, 2010

Ahmed Rashid in the New York Review of Books:

Pakistan has taken an awfully long time to understand that it faces an unprecedented terrorist threat that is not a result of conspiracies hatched in Washington, New Delhi or Tel-Aviv, as many in the public believe, but that is the result of the Pakistani state’s nurturing of extremist groups since the 1970s.

Part of the problem is the refusal of the army and the government to accept the fact that Pakistan faces a serious terrorist threat in its populated heartland of Punjab. Just a few days before this latest episode, federal ministers, army spokesmen and Punjab province’s Chief Minister Shabaz Sharif heatedly denied the existence of a Punjabi branch of the Taliban, maintaining therefore that no punitive action against Punjabi militants was required. Yet in recent years, Punjabi Taliban been has been responsible for attacking army headquarters, police stations and offices of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

The Punjabi Taliban are distinct from the Pashtun Taliban that have been fighting the Pakistan army in the Northwestern tribal areas and attacking US forces in Afghanistan. Although many of the Punjabi groups have developed close links to the Pashtun Taliban and al-Qaeda in the Northwest, they were originally trained in the 1980s by the military to fight Indian forces in Kashmir.

Since that covert war and the Kashmir insurgency wound down in 2004, these groups have been at a loss as to what do with themselves. There has been no disarmament and demobilization program of the Punjabi Taliban because every Pakistani government has denied that they exist.

One major Punjab-based group—the former Lashkar-e-Tayaba—perpetrated the massacre in Mumbai in India in 2008 and nearly bought the two countries to war. The army is now committed to fighting the Pashtun Taliban, but it still does not publicly accept the threat to our Punjab heartland, where many terrorists now operating in the Northwest originate from, and where most of the army’s soldiers are also recruited from.

More here.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

Sol LeWitt was fond of cubes. Sometimes, he would make sculptures that were nothing but cubes, cubes within cubes upon cubes. In the early 1970s, LeWitt produced works like “Cube Structures Based on Five Modules.” The title captures the essence of the work. LeWitt took a bunch of open cubes made of wood, painted them white, and arranged them in various geometric structures. He just liked the cubiness of cubes.

This led a number of critics to think of LeWitt as a formalist. All the geometry spoke for itself. This was an artist of Cartesian spaces and strict rationalism. LeWitt was showing us something about the austere beauty of form. His white lattices were supposed to be an abstract representation of Mind itself, the way principles of thought progress from root axioms to logically deduced conclusions.

It took the great art critic Rosalind Krauss to notice that there was a madness in all these cubes. Why, wondered Rosalind, can't you stop this manic proliferation of cubes, Mr. LeWitt? It was a good question. A couple of cubes here and there might make a fair, if boring, point about form. But LeWitt was obsessed. Here's what Krauss said in an essay about LeWitt in her epochal The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths:

Like most of LeWitt's work, “Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes” provides one with an experience that is obsessional in kind. On the vast platform, too splayed to be taken in at a glance, the 122 neat little fragmented frames, all meticulously painted white, sit in regimented but meaningless lines, the demonstration of a kind of mad obstinacy.

More here.

Our own J. E. H. Smith, in his eponymous weblog:

Why do I feel so much more at home in Finland than in France, in spite of having spent a good part of my adult life trying to fit in in the latter republic, jetting back and forth to Charles de Gaulle, learning to gossip about Sarkozy as if I cared, nodding knowingly when some third party, some briefcase-toting little man in a fine-tailored suit, is marked out as a normalien? I come back to Helsinki after 19 years, for only the second time in my life, the language is just as impenetrable as ever, and yet I experience the whole thing as fitting and easy, while every visit to Paris is experienced as nothing more than a resistance test.

What is it, exactly? There is a general feeling of at-homeness that I have not just in Finland, but in a certain swath of the world that extends mostly across the northern zones of the continents of the North Atlantic. I only very gradually came to realize that this swath is co-extensive with that small bit of the earth's surface which, 400-some years ago, was swept up in the spirit of Reformation. Now I would like to think that this is a distinction that does not matter. I spent a good part of my life in complete ignorance of it, and even have a distinct memory of being 13 and still being confused as to which of the pair of terms, 'Protestant' and 'prostitute', means what. But now it seems clear and undeniable to me that there is a deep cultural divide that, while it might not in fact trace its causes back to the wars of religion, somehow sits on the map in the same way as those wars' eventual boundaries.

If I can put this in a different way, and in a way that will at first sound like a change of subject: I think it's safe to say that one would be hard pressed to locate a single French academic in his thirties who could correctly identify a song by Motörhead. In my recent unscientific survey of a comparison class of Finnish philosophers, by contrast, I discovered that five out of five displayed a high level of Motörhead-recognition ability, could make fine-grained distinctions between black metal, death metal, Viking metal and other sub-sub-genres of metal, and, while not ignorant of baroque chamber music, certainly would not see familiarity with it as the key to upward mobility towards the cultural elite. What, one wonders, would Distinction have looked like if Bourdieu had been a Finn?

More here.

“AP Photographer Charlie Riedel just filed the following images of seabirds caught in the oil slick on a beach on Louisiana's East Grand Terre Island. As BP engineers continue their efforts to cap the underwater flow of oil, landfall is becoming more frequent, and the effects more evident.”

More from the Boston Globe here. [Thanks to Carl Zimmer.]