3quarksdaily

The Godfather of American Liberalism

From The City Journal:

Herbert George Wells was already a renowned writer of fiction when in 1901 he published the nonfiction work Anticipations of the Reactions of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought. The book’s scientific prescriptions to cure social diseases turned the novelist into a seer, both in England and in America, where Anticipations had already been serialized in the North American Review. More than any other intellectual of the time, Wells spoke to two enormous nineteenth-century shifts: the growth of giant industries, which undercut the old assumptions about the sovereignty of the individual; and Darwinism’s concussive reassignment of humanity from the spiritual to the natural world, which begged for prophets of a naturalized humanity.

Numerous fin de siècle writers had looked backward at a century of material and mechanical progress, both to praise its achievements and to condemn its running sore, the seemingly permanent misery of the urban working class. But Wells looked ahead, asserting that the future as well as the past had a pattern. He argued inductively about the nature of what was likely to come, based on the way the telephone, telegraph, and railroad had shrunk the world, and he populated his predictions with a dramatic cast of collective characters. Some he loathed: the idle, parasitic rich; the “vicious helpless pauper masses,” the “People of the Abyss”; and the yapping politicians and yellow journalists whom he considered instruments of patriotism and war.

More here.

Honduran Coup: Target Left?

Roger Burback in CounterPunch:

The coup against Manuel Zelaya of Honduras represents a last ditch effort by Honduras’ entrenched economic and political interests to stave off the advance of the new left governments that have taken hold in Latin America over the past decade. As Zelaya proclaimed after being forcibly dumped in Costa Rica: “This is a vicious plot planned by elites. The elites only want to keep the country isolated and in extreme poverty.”

Zelaya should know, since his roots are in the country’s large, land-owning class, having devoted most of his life to agriculture and forestry enterprises that he inherited. He ran for president as the head of the center-right Liberal Party on a fairly conservative platform, promising to be tough on crime and to cut the budget. Inaugurated in January, 2006, he supported the US-backed Central American Free Trade Agreement, which been signed two years earlier, and continued the economic policies of neo-liberalism, privatizing state held enterprises.

But about half way into his four year term, the winds of change blowing from the south caught his imagination, particularly those coming from Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela, the largest regional power fronting on the Caribbean. With no petroleum resources, Honduras signed a generous oil subsidy deal with Venezuela, and then last year joined the emergent regional trade bloc, ALBA, the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas. Inspired by Venezuela it now has Bolivia, Cuba, Nicaragua, Dominica and Ecuador as members. Simultaneously, Zelaya implemented domestic reform policies, significantly increasing the minimum wage of workers and teachers’ salaries, while stepping up spending in health care and education.

More here.  [Thanks to Isabel Toledo.]

Treat killing like a disease to slash shootings

Andy Coghlan in New Scientist:

Shootings and killings in deprived areas of Chicago and Baltimore have plummeted by between 41 and 73 per cent thanks to a programme that treats violence as if it is an infectious disease.

Pioneers of the programme, called CeaseFire, say it relies on simultaneously changing attitudes and behaviour and will work anywhere.

The key is to change social norms so that violence is seen as "uncool" both by potential perpetrators and their communities, instead of being the automatic way to settle a dispute.

On 30 June, pioneers of the programme publicised their high success rate so far to attract interest at a time in the year when violence peaks, triggered by the heat.

"Violence gets transmitted the same way as other communicable diseases, so we train 'violence interruptors' to prevent escalation," says Gary Slutkin, founder and executive director of CeaseFire.

"They change the norm from 'violence is what's expected of me' to 'violence will make me look stupid'," says Slutkin.

More here.

Who Lincoln Was

Sean Wilentz in The New Republic:

The past three generations of historians have agreed that Abraham Lincoln was probably the best president in American history and that Franklin Pierce was one of the worst. Pierce, a New Hampshire Democrat, gave political cover to fractious slaveholders and their violent supporters in the 1850s. His softness on the slavery issue encouraged the southern truculence that later led to secession and the formation of the Confederacy. Apart from their closeness in age--the bicentennial of Pierce's birth passed virtually unnoticed four and a half years ago--about the only things that he and Lincoln had in common were their preoccupation with politics and their success in reaching the White House.

When Pierce ran for president in 1852, Lincoln, naturally, campaigned against him. But the cause of the Whig party was extremely feeble in Illinois that year. (The Whigs, originally formed in opposition to Andrew Jackson, were a national coalition of pro-business conservatives, reformers who supported economic development, and moderate southern planters. Lincoln remained a staunch Whig loyalist until the party crumbled in 1854.) And so Lincoln limited himself to a long speech in Springfield--it took him two days to deliver it!--which he abridged and repeated in Peoria. The speech did nothing to affect the outcome of the election, in Illinois or in the country at large. But it deserves to be remembered in these days of Lincoln idolatry, because it can be disturbing reading to anyone inclined to worship Father Abraham.

More here.

Richard Feynman on doubt, uncertainty and religion

The Hotel

The early part of the century saw an explosion of literature with the hotel at its heart, reflecting a period of enormous social change on both sides of the Atlantic. At the same time that the work that Matthias explores was being written—Kafka, Stefan Zweig Franz Werfel, Joseph Roth, Thomas Mann—American writers such as Edith Wharton, Henry James and Sinclair Lewis too wrote about hotels. And British writers like Rosamond Lehmann, Jean Rhys, Evelyn Waugh and Elizabeth Bowen all made use of the literary hotel in their fiction, at a time when travelogues (JB Priestly, George Orwell) also abounded. The hotel as an institution is a product of the transnational industrialisation and development that took place at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, and thus an important vantage point from which to observe that change. The emergence of a bourgeois leisure class and the shift from a sedentary to a travelling society was reflected in literature with a focus on newly created modern spaces. These began to prise apart the strict boundaries between public and private that had hitherto been so important in the consolidation of a bourgeois identity. Ironically, one of the novels that best captures this moment was published in 1997. Steven Millhauser’s Pulitzer prize-winning Martin Dressler is a fairytale-like invocation of fin-de-siècle New York. Dressler, a flâneur who spends his life in semi-public spaces, watching and speculating, neither at home nor dislocated from home, neither alone nor part of a group, rises from humble beginnings to own a chain of hotels.

more from Monica Ali at Prospect here.

baldwin in istanbul

Some time after James Baldwin arrived in Istanbul he settled in Gumussuyu, a neighbourhood that hangs on the side of one of the city’s many hills, above the Golden Horn, the shores of Asia, and even the Sea of Marmara. Baldwin was a drinker, and one of his favourite neighbourhood spots was the Park Hotel. These days that glamorous meeting place is a terrible hulking carcass of a stunted building project, all grey, barren floors and trash heaps, stray dogs barking at nothing all hours of the day. Both vistas – the fabled view, the hovering skeleton – loom outside the living room windows of the great Turkish actor Engin Cezzar, who was largely responsible for Baldwin’s little-known sojourn in Turkey, where he lived on and off throughout the 1960s. When I went to visit Cezzar last winter, a collection of letters between Baldwin and Cezzar had just been showcased in an Istanbul bookstore along with Baldwin’s translated works, and I told Cezzar I’d bought them. He scowled: “Don’t read Jimmy Baldwin in Turkish, for Christ’s sake.” Cezzar seemed proud of his book, and his special friendship with “Jimmy,” but he had priorities. He prized Baldwin as one thing above all else: a writer.

more from Suzy Hansen at The National here.

how would he paint?

In 1945, Pablo Picasso was invited to illustrate the elegiac Le Chant des morts, a book of poems by Pierre Reverdy that contemplates mortality after World War I. Yet when the publisher sent him a sample written in the poet’s handwriting, Picasso thought it “almost a drawing in itself.” Inspired by the shape of Reverdy’s script, Picasso crafted bright red, fanciful calligraphic images for the book, offsetting the poems’ melancholy and calling attention to the material presence of the page itself—what art historian Irene Small refers to as “a registration of painting pulled into the physical space of writing.” Picasso had long been fascinated with the correspondence between image and text; in his “papiers collés,” 1912–14, he famously collaged fragments of newspaper, inviting the viewer to read into the surface of the canvas; later, he treated newspaper pages as grids on which he composed figural drawings and paintings. Picasso also tried his hand at writing. In 1935, suffering from a bout of artist’s block, he stopped painting and, for one year, zealously wrote poems instead. (His friend and patron Gertrude Stein was not a fan.) In reconciling his personal obstacles as an artist, Picasso declared, “i will no longer paint the arrow / we see in the drop of water / trembling in the morning.” Here, he rejects not only representation (pointing where to look and how) but also signification (painting as a visual trick that portends something it is not). But without these foundations, how would he paint?

more from Stefanie Sobelle at Bookforum here.

Above and Beyond: The Apollo Space Race to the Moon

From History Today:

It is 40 years since Neil Armstrong took his ‘giant leap for mankind’ on the early summer morning of July 20th, 1969. It was the high point of a vast and expensive space programme initiated by President John F. Kennedy in the early 1960s which ended when Apollo 17’s lunar module lifted off from the Moon on December 14th, 1972. In just under three and a half years, 12 US astronauts walked on the Moon, drove around in their Moon buggy and thrilled television viewers around the world with their barely believable pantomime on a celestial body 236,000 miles from Earth.

The end came suddenly and space has not captured the public’s attention in the same way since, except, in a very different way, in response to the tragedies of the space shuttles Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003. The Apollo programme had to compete for attention with other major events: the large-scale unrest in the US over civil rights and against the Vietnam war; then, less than a year after the last Apollo mission, the Watergate scandal which brought down President Nixon. Throughout these upheavals, astronauts walked on the Moon, flew the American flag and displayed the might of US technology and resources to massive global audiences in what remains, arguably, the greatest technical achievement of mankind.

More here.

Friday Poem

Driving Lesson
Renay

I learned to drive on this road flattened between
cornfield and pasture. my stick legs folded onto daddy's lap
the sun white off the Plymouth hood, ribboned
down a windshield crack. careful. so careful, I
curved the wheel between a shallow grade to the corn
and a runoff ditch where tadpoles swam together
like bee swarms then exploded apart, comma bodies
shooting from the huddle at a stone drop in the water

daddy whistled The Year that Clayton Delaney Died
to the back of my neck while I crisscrossed the car over dust ruts.
sixteen blocks in the city. out here it was
twenty rows of irrigation pipe, two mailboxes, Fred's pig shed.
I never saw Fred's pigs but my cousin Janell did.

I swayed through every slouch in the road, passed the truck cab
splotched rust and green hunkering in a blackberry tangle.
every year those berries plumped out fat and sweet,
then wrinkled to dry nubs while we watched from the fence line
where a bull waited to stick little girls on his yellow horns.

we snuck a bath towel out once, Clorox white with fat red roses
spilled across it. we shook it at him but he stood bull still
watching us run to the fence, shake the towel, then scramble away.
he stood bull still while those red red bullfighter roses flashed at him
so we proclaimed him colorblind.

I watched from the toolshed while he stood still again when they
shot him then rolled his stomach, red and white like the towel,
onto the pasture. I wasn't afraid of him humped over on the grass.
that sticky mat of blood made me want to charge at them, gore them
through the fence with my imaginary horns

on the day they butchered, I touched him for the first time. his
horns as thick as my forearm, round on the end
not ice pick sharp. all summer we ate beef for supper. beef
and unguarded blackberries that stained our faces purple.

I learned to steer on this road.


from: Agnieszka’s Dowry

Jyri Engeström on Microblogging

My old friend Jyri, who, along with Marko Ahtisaari, got me started blogging:

Delhi High Court Decriminalises Homosexuality

India moves closer to civil rights for all its citizens, in the Hindustan Times:

It observed that the inclusiveness that the Indian society traditionally displayed in every aspect of life manifested in recognising a role in society for everyone.

"Those perceived by the majority as 'deviants' or 'different' are not on that score excluded or ostracised," the Chief Justice writing the judgement for the Bench, said.

Where society can display inclusiveness and understanding, such persons can be assured of a life of dignity and non-discrimination, it said.

"This was the spirit behind the resolution of which Jawaharlal Nehru spoke so passionately," the Bench said referring to the Objective Resolution moved by him on December 13, 1946 at the Constituent Assembly debate.

Quoting Nehru, Justice Shah said "words are magic things often enough, even the magic of words sometimes cannot convey magic of human spirit and of a nation's passion ...(this resolution seeks very feebly to tell the world of what we have thought or dreamt of so long, and what we now hope to achieve in near future)".

He said Nehru was of the view that the House should consider the resolution not in a spirit of narrow legal wording, but rather look at the spirit behind that resolution.

The Bench was critical of the provision of section 377 of IPC holding that "a provision of law branding one section of people as criminal based wholly on states' moral disapproval of that class goes counter to equality guaranteed in the Constitution."

"The provision of section 377 runs counter to the Constitutional values and the notion of human dignity which is considered to be cornerstone of our constitution.

To Become An Extremist, Hang Around With People You Agree With

Cass Sunstein in The Spectator:

Some years ago, a number of citizens of France were assembled into small groups to exchange views about their president and about the intentions of the United States with respect to foreign aid. Before they started to talk, the participants tended to like their president and to distrust the intentions of the United States. After they talked, some strange things happened. Those who began by liking their president ended up liking their president significantly more. And those who expressed mild distrust toward the United States moved in the direction of far greater distrust. The small groups of French citizens became more extreme. As a result of their discussions, they were more enthusiastic about their leader, and far more sceptical of the United States, than similar people in France who had not been brought together to speak with one another.

This tale reveals a general fact of social life: much of the time groups of people end up thinking and doing things that group members would never think or do on their own. This is true for groups of teenagers, who are willing to run risks that individuals would avoid. It is certainly true for those prone to violence, including terrorists and those who commit genocide. It is true for investors and corporate executives. It is true for government officials, neighbourhood groups, social reformers, political protestors, police officers, student organisations, labour unions and juries. Some of the best and worst developments in social life are a product of group dynamics, in which members of organisations, both small and large, move one another in new directions.

Time for Obama to Start Spending Political Capital

Lincoln Mitchell in The Huffington Post:

Throughout his presidential campaign, but more notably, during his presidency, President Obama has shown himself to have an impressive ability to accumulate political capital. During his tenure in the White House, Obama has done this by reaching out to a range of constituencies, moderating some of his programs, pursuing middle of the road approaches on key foreign policy questions and, not insignificantly, working to ensure that his approval rating remains quite high.

Political capital is not, however, like money, it cannot be saved up interminably while its owner waits for the right moment to spend it. Political capital has a shelf life, and often not a very long one. If it is not used relatively quickly, it dissipates and becomes useless to its owner. This is the moment in which Obama, who has spent the first few months of his presidency diligently accumulating political capital, now finds himself. The next few months will be a key time for Obama. If Obama does not spend this political capital during the next months, it will likely be gone by the New Year anyway.

Muslim Women's Rights, Continued

Katha Pollitt in The Nation:

I thought President Obama's Cairo speech was basically fine: begin anew, extend the hand, reject "crude stereotypes" all around, turn the page on the Christian triumphalism of the Bush years. But there's no denying that the section on women's rights was rather minimal, just three paragraphs, compared with his long discourse on Israel and Palestine; and to my American ears its priorities were a bit odd. You would think the biggest issue for Muslim women is that someone is preventing them from wearing a headscarf: "The US government has gone to court to protect the right of women and girls to wear the hijab and to punish those who would deny it," he said. "I reject the view of some in the West that a woman who chooses to cover her hair is somehow less equal." Fair enough, but that woman is choosing. What about Saudi or Iranian women, who are forced by law to cover? Obama noted that countries where women are well educated tend to be more prosperous and promised American aid for women's literacy and microloans. These are both good things, especially in desperately poor and underdeveloped countries like Afghanistan; but face it, to become full participants in modern societies women need more than a grade school education and a sewing machine. They need their rights. In fact, some Muslim countries, like Iran, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, already have large numbers of highly educated women--in Iran, as in America, more young women go to college than men. But those women are prevented from working to their capacity, or even at all, by religiously motivated sex discrimination. In Saudi Arabia, women can't even work in lingerie stores. By a quirk of the gender-apartheid regulations, only men can sell ladies' underwear. So much for "modesty": when there's money to be made from women, you can be sure the theocrats will figure out a reason that God wants it to go into men's pockets.

Rationality in Action

Raimo Tuomela reviews John Searle's Rationality in Action, in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:

This book is vintage Searle, with the good (and less good) features that one is accustomed to find in his previous books. It is written in engaging style and is accessible to a wide audience, even if it is not perhaps meant for the layman. It contains lots of interesting arguments and some new things, especially the ideas about non-sufficient causation of action and a comprehensive account of reasons for action. The main contributions of the book are indeed about these two topics. Especially the account of reasons, and among them of desire-independent reasons, will probably be of lasting value in the philosophy of action.

I will below concentrate on a couple of topics that are central in the book. The first topic is causation of action. Briefly, the agent’s desires and beliefs do not cause the agent’s decisions and intentions - at least from the first person point of view (Searle’s standpoint until the last chapter). This is due to the agent’s free will: he is free to decide which desires and beliefs he will act on. This is the first “gap”. In Searle’s action theory an intentional action “normally” comes about due to an agent’s prior intention which leads causally, but not with necessitating causality, to action. The latter itself consists of the agent’s intention-in-action (“volitional” element) and the behavior caused by it. The second gap is that between the prior intention and the intention-in-action, and is dramatically exemplified by the phenomena of weakness of the will. The third gap is that between the initiated action and its completion. According to Searle, “ ’the gap’ is the general name that I have introduced for the phenomenon that we do not normally experience the stages of our deliberations and voluntary actions as having causally sufficient conditions or as setting causally sufficient conditions for the next stage” (p. 50). All of these gaps are familiar phenomena and have been extensively discussed in the literature.

If there is a piece of news here it is that there is only non-sufficient causation between the prior intention and the intention-in-action.

farrah dead too

In hindsight, of course, Farrah was a problematic role model. Scanning the entire hot-cop lineup, she was by far the most kittenish, the most little-girl-like and least threatening--which unquestionably added to her popularity, especially among men. (Not that the curves and hair weren't enough.) In that way, she was a bit like Marilyn Monroe, simultaneously girlish and yet jaw-droppingly sexual. (Or, more recently, Scarlett Johansson--who, my husband shrewdly observes, has stormed to acclaim as an overgrown little girl with enomous knockers.) But my six-year-old friends and I never thought in those terms; we were years away from understanding the concept of "Jiggle TV," much less why it might be a bad thing. We liked the guns and the gowns and the karate kicks and the sight of a bunch of really pretty ladies getting the best of the bad guys. And, oh yes, we loved the fact that, week after week, the chicks dashed out to save the day while their faithful handler, John Bosley, functioned as a genial, glorified manservant; I vividly recall our neighborhood recreations of the show featuring much abuse of poor Bosley. What can I say? Even in the Deep South in the '70s we were tired of the guys having all the fun.

more from Michelle Cottle at TNR here.

It remains for poets to write honest poetry

Poets usually write about themselves, even when they are pretending not to. But few can have put themselves forward quite so much as Umberto Saba, the Triestine writer who has sometimes been rated one of Italy’s best poets of the twentieth century and who, in his own opinion, was quite simply the greatest since Leopardi. What is strange is that the more you read Saba, the less the “autolatria” or self-worship, as Montale called it, seems off-putting. Rather than self-aggrandizement, it comes over more as an unstable, knowing series of self-projections, which the reader is implicitly asked to recognize and empathize with and which, when everything goes well, give rise to poetry. Saba freely acknowledged that it didn’t always go well, but the one thing he was convinced about all his life was that great poetry, including his own best work, provided a special kind of enjoyment that made up for the misery and confusion from which it emerged, not just for himself (he was a lifelong depressive) but for everyone. You don’t have to take him at his word to feel that some of his poems combine wonderful qualities of song with emotional density in a way that is rare in modern poetry and that others subtly and often ironically recast traditional Italian poetry from within rather than by taking it apart. “M’incantò la rima fiore / amore, / la più antica difficile del mondo”, he wrote in a short late poem – “I was enchanted by the rhyme June, / moon, the oldest and most stubborn in the world”, in the version given here by George Hochfield and Leonard Nathan who find plausible English equivalents for the rhyme “fiore / amore” but distort “difficile” with “stubborn”. Perhaps it was indeed a kind of lowest common denominator of the Italian tradition that he worked with, though he added a dose of Heine to give it a tart edge and a certain syntactic awkwardness which stops the reader from being too carried away by the flow.

more from Peter Hainsworth at the TLS here.

writing about music is like dancing about architecture

I just published a novel about music. Early in the process of writing it, I was warned by a similarly music-obsessive friend that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”[1] Since that first somewhat menacing reminder, I’ve heard the line frequently. At first blush, the claim is a smugly dismissive one: verbal descriptions of music are doomed to be pointlessly, perhaps even ridiculously, inferior to actual music. As a reader, I resisted this idea; it just felt false, though I couldn’t quite say why. But as a writer, this assertion paralyzed me: I didn’t want to waste two or three years trying to produce something that could not be produced.[2] I tried to put aside the line’s foundational snobbery (“My music is too ineffable for your inky art”), and then, reassuringly, it seemed like nothing more than a truism: words are words and music is music. And perfume is perfume; paintings are paintings; facial features are facial features. Yet writers are never counseled against attempting to evoke paintings or smells or faces or feelings or buildings or the nonmelodic sounds of jackhammers, thunder, or snoring. What was so elusive about music that it couldn’t be captured by words?

more from Arthur Phillips at The Believer here.

Thursday Poem

Feng Shui
Bob Bradshaw

You stir fry your bok choy,
your Chinese mushrooms
and noodles.  There
is no other pair of chopsticks
dipping into your pot.

Is the feng shui wrong?

Your mother advised you at 6
that if you get lost
don’t move.  
Someone will find you.
Where is the husband
your mother promised?

Your luck will surely
turn.  For the third time this month
you rearrange the furniture.
You hang wind chimes,
add plants.  Nothing
must impede the flow

of Chi.  You need harmony
in your life.  Then
an old class mate calls.

He asks you out to dinner
where casually he drops the news:
He’s divorced, a recovering alcoholic.  
Even bankrupt.  But he’s blessed

with four teenage girls

who need a mother.


from: Apple Valley Review
Vol 2, No. 1 (Spring (2007)

The Hajj, Screened Large

From Harvard Magazine:

Journey to Mecca took five years to make, and required no fewer than 85 permits from government agencies in Saudi Arabia; the diplomatic process of building relationships was one that Cunningham-Reid summarizes as “a million cups of tea.” Cosmic Picture also raised the $13-million budget from an international corps of investors, hired actor Ben Kingsley to narrate, made a distribution deal with the National Geographic Society, and booked the January 2009 world premiere in Abu Dhabi. In coming months, Journey to Mecca will show at the Smithsonian Institution, at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and other American cities. Endorsed by both the Dalai Lama and the archbishop of Canterbury, the film has drawn audiences in Kuwait, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, and Canada.

Non-Muslims like Davies and Cunningham-Reid cannot enter the holy city, so they trained two all-Islamic camera crews to shoot images like the spectacular aerial shot of thousands of pilgrims circling the Ka‘ba, the black cubical building in the center of Mecca that is the most sacred site in Islam. (Islamic tradition holds that Abraham [Ibrahim] built the first structure on the site, and all Muslims face the Ka‘ba when praying. Abraham’s centrality indicates, as Davies explains, that the hajj actually connects with Jewish and Christian, as well as Islamic, traditions.)

Journey to Mecca tells its story by dramatizing the pilgrimage of Ibn Battuta, who set out from Tangier in 1325 and arrived in Mecca 18 months later. (He then kept voyaging, for 29 years and 75,000 miles more, becoming the best-traveled person of antiquity—and also the only person to have both a crater on the moon and a mall in Dubai named after him.) His hajj, described in his memoir, the Rihla, waited only seven centuries to find its way onto the big screen.

More here.

Walking On Air in Chicago

From The Washington Post:

Don't look down. Or do, since that's the idea. But brace for vertigo. In the city of big shoulders, this is like standing on an eyelash. It's a glass ledge, 1 1/2 inches thick and poking out about four feet from the 103rd floor of the Sears Tower. There is no frame under the floor, only air -- 1,353 feet of it, straight down to the miniature taxis on Wacker Drive. Picture Wile E. Coyote racing off the cliff. Think of the moment when he suddenly looks down. Only you don't actually fall. The reason is an intriguing feat of engineering, a team of designers and builders said Wednesday, swearing on a stack of liability policies as they unveiled the project. The ledge -- actually four identical glass boxes suspended near the top of the nation's tallest building -- opens to the intrepid Thursday.

The natural instinct is to inch out onto the glass very, very slowly, said sheet metal worker Leo Thier, who took a break from another job to venture into the box. Still in his hard hat and construction boots, he delivered his verdict: "It's fantastic. It's insane."

More here.

The exaggerated fears over digital warfare

Evgeny Morozov in the Boston Review:

The age of cyber-warfare has arrived. That, at any rate, is the message we are now hearing from a broad range of journalists, policy analysts, and government officials. Introducing a comprehensive White House report on cyber-security released at the end of May, President Obama called cyber-security “one of the most serious economic and national security challenges we face as a nation.” His words echo a flurry of gloomy think-tank reports. The Defense Science Board, a federal advisory group, recently warned that “cyber-warfare is here to stay,” and that it will “encompass not only military attacks but also civilian commercial systems.” And “Securing Cyberspace for the 44th President,” prepared by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, suggests that cyber-security is as great a concern as “weapons of mass destruction or global jihad.”

Unfortunately, these reports are usually richer in vivid metaphor—with fears of “digital Pearl Harbors” and “cyber-Katrinas”—than in factual foundation.

Consider a frequently quoted CIA claim about using the Internet to cause widespread power outages. It derives from a public presentation by a senior CIA cyber-security analyst in early 2008. Here is what he said:

We have information, from multiple regions outside the United States, of cyber-intrusions into utilities, followed by extortion demands. We suspect, but cannot confirm, that some of these attackers had the benefit of inside knowledge. We have information that cyber-attacks have been used to disrupt power equipment in several regions outside the United States. In at least one case, the disruption caused a power outage affecting multiple cities. We do not know who executed these attacks or why, but all involved intrusions through the Internet.

So “there is information” that cyber-attacks “ have been used.” When? Why? By whom? And have the attacks caused any power outages? The CIA may have some classified information, but very little that is unclassified suggests that such cyber-intrusions have occurred.

More here.

Richard Dawkins interviews Craig Venter

Newton, P.I.

Sean Carroll in Cosmic Variance:

When I was studying for my Ph.D., a fellow grad student and I asked our advisor if he could think of one single characteristic that was common to all of the best scientists he knew. Without too much hesitation, he answered: “Hard work.” That certainly wasn’t the answer we wanted to hear — you mean there isn’t some secret recipe to being brilliant? And of course hard work is not nearly enough to elevate you to the ranks of the world’s great scientists. But now that I have marinated for some time in the juices of experience myself, I see the truth of what he was getting at; there are a lot of smart people out there, so it shouldn’t be any surprise that what elevates a few of them above their peers is an extraordinary focus on their work and a great amount of simple effort.

So it should come as no surprise that Isaac Newton, the greatest physicist of all time, was a relentless worker. In his days at Cambridge, when he focused on the workings of the natural world, he would spend as little time as possible on anything that drew him away from the researches in his rooms. Over the couple of years he was writing the Principia Mathematica, he took things to extremes, going for extended periods without food or sleep. (He also, apparently, died a virgin. Extremes come in many guises.)

Most contemporary physicists have heard that Newton eventually left Cambridge and more or less turned his back on scientific research, to take up activities in later life that we associate with varying degrees of disreputability: alchemy, religious studies, taking a bureaucratic position at the Royal Mint, using the Royal Society to attack his scientific rivals. Lots of us shrug and agree that many older scientists do all sorts of crazy things, and don’t wonder too much about the details.

Happily, Tom Levenson (of The Inverse Square, and one of our honored guest bloggers) has provided us with a fascinating peek into a telling episode in Newton’s later life — his career as a criminal investigator. Not really “P.I.”, as Newton was acting in his capacity as a government official, the Warden of the Mint. The story is closer to something from Law and Order or CSI — remarkably close, in fact.

More here.

Act to Stop the Violence in Iran

Via Nico Pitney, something you can do right now to stop the violence in Iran:

Iranian Americans and people all over the world have been touched by the courage of the Iranian people--and horrified by the violence used against them. 

Throughout the recent crisis, NIAC has been in contact with the White House almost daily to convey the views of our community, and policymakers have been listening.  Based on your feedback, we have strongly condemned the crackdown and called for new elections as the best way to end the violence. 

 

But we need to do more. We need to stop the bloodshed. 

 

Send a letter to the Ambassadors from Russia, China, and the EU, and tell them to use their influence with Iran to bring the violence to an end. 

 

Iran is a signatory to a number of international agreements, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and therefore has a responsibility to respect the human rights of the Iranian people.  The government's brutality since the election is completely unacceptable regardless of the circumstances; irrespective of whether the election was fair or unfair, the ongoing violence cannot stand.

 

Without formal diplomatic relations between the United States and Iran, there simply isn't a lot that the US can do.  That is why it is so important for countries that do have formal ties with Iran to use their influence to stop the crackdown.  By virtue of their diplomatic relations and extensive trade ties to Iran, the Europeans, Chinese, and Russians should seize the opportunity to use their influence with the Iranian government to end the violence.

 

Unfortunately, many of these governments have done little, if anything, to end the violence.  That is why they need to hear from you. 

 

Take a moment to ask the Europeans, Chinese, and Russians to leverage their relationships with Iran to ensure an end to the violence against the Iranian people.

Go here to send the email letter.

A halo without the light

The battle on the streets of Tehran and the provincial towns of Iran arises not merely in a disputed election but in the clash of two views of Persian history that have become hard to reconcile. For Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, declared the 10th president of the Islamic republic in what even his supporters hail as a "miracle", history ended on 1 February 1979, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned from exile in Paris to inaugurate the new revolutionary government. The story of humanity, which up to that moment had been the persistent thwarting of God's will by Jews, Arabs, heretics, kings, drunkards, liberals and the British, had now entered its end phase. It was just a matter for a learned cleric to administer first Iran, then the whole world, until the Lord of Time revealed himself to his favourite nation and ushered in an age of justice and the end of the world. The Lord of Time, or Mahdi, the 12th descendant of the prophet Muhammad through his daughter Fatemeh, escaped Arab persecution as a small boy in Iraq and went into hiding in 874. Present in the world in flesh and bone, the Mahdi passes unrecognised through the Shia cities, walking perhaps even among the Tehran crowds streaming between Enqelab and Azad. Yet for many supporters of the defeated candidates in the election, there is another view of history that rejects Khomeini's fantastic theories of clerical government, the religiosity of Ahmadinejad, the grinding air of eschatological menace and, above all, the regime's metaphysical liberties with the truth.

more from James Buchan at The Guardian here.

deus ex machina

"Employ these new technologies to make the Gospel known, so that the Good News of God’s infinite love for all people will resound in new ways across our increasingly technological world!" These could have been the words of Johannes Gutenberg or Billy Graham. In fact, they belong to the current pope, Benedict XVI. He spoke them last month in anticipation of World Social Communication Day, an annual event intended to spread the Good News of God’s infinite love using mass media outlets. The message this year was mostly for the kids: “Young people in particular, I appeal to you: Bear witness to your faith through the digital world!” Catholics aren’t the only Christians connecting on the Web. When it was created in 2007, GodTube — an alternative to YouTube created for Christians and since renamed tangle — was the fastest-growing website in the U.S. Two years later, it’s just one of millions of such sites where people of Christian faith can find each other, date, discuss scripture, promote business, and debate the effects of technology on believers. There’s christiananswers.net and biblegateway.com, which lets you search Bible passages in over 100 languages (Always wanted to say “The Lord is my Shepherd” in Tagalog?), the rather moderate jesusfreak.com, christian.com, .net, .org…. You get the idea.

more from Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set here.

gladwell v. anderson

At a hearing on Capitol Hill in May, James Moroney, the publisher of the Dallas Morning News, told Congress about negotiations he’d just had with the online retailer Amazon. The idea was to license his newspaper’s content to the Kindle, Amazon’s new electronic reader. “They want seventy per cent of the subscription revenue,” Moroney testified. “I get thirty per cent, they get seventy per cent. On top of that, they have said we get the right to republish your intellectual property to any portable device.” The idea was that if a Kindle subscription to the Dallas Morning News cost ten dollars a month, seven dollars of that belonged to Amazon, the provider of the gadget on which the news was read, and just three dollars belonged to the newspaper, the provider of an expensive and ever-changing variety of editorial content. The people at Amazon valued the newspaper’s contribution so little, in fact, that they felt they ought then to be able to license it to anyone else they wanted. Another witness at the hearing, Arianna Huffington, of the Huffington Post, said that she thought the Kindle could provide a business model to save the beleaguered newspaper industry. Moroney disagreed. “I get thirty per cent and they get the right to license my content to any portable device—not just ones made by Amazon?” He was incredulous. “That, to me, is not a model.”

more from Malcolm Gladwell at The New Yorker here.

Wednesday Poem

Tarantulas on the Lifebuoy
Thomas Lux

For some semitropical reason
when the rains fall
relentlessly they fall
 
into swimming pools, these otherwise
bright and scary
arachnids.   They can swim
a little, but not for long
 
and they can't climb the ladder out.
They usually drown - but
if you want their favor,
if you believe there is justice,
a reward for not loving
 
the death of ugly
and even dangerous (the eel, hog snake,
rats) creatures, if
 
you believe these things, then
you would leave a lifebuoy
or two in your swimming pool at night.
 
And in the morning
you would haul ashore
the huddled, hairy survivors
 
and escort them
back to the bush, and know,
be assured that at least these saved,
as individuals, would not turn up
 
again someday
in your hat, drawer,
or the tangled underworld
 
of your socks, and that even -
when your belief in justice
merges with your belief in dreams -
they may tell the others
 
in a sign language
four times as subtle
and complicated as man's
 
that you are good,
that you love them,
that you would save them again.

Hanif Kureishi: turning The Black Album into a stage play

From The Guardian:

Last summer I suggested to Jatinder Verma that we attempt a dramatisation of my second novel, The Black Album. This was a novel I had begun to think about in 1991, not long after the publication of The Buddha of Suburbia. Unlike that story, which I'd been trying to tell in numerous versions since I first decided to become a writer, aged 14, The Black Album was more or less contemporary, a "state of Britain" narrative not unlike those I'd grown up watching, enthralled and excited, on television and in the theatre, particularly the Royal Court.

Around the time of its publication in 1993, there had been talk of filming The Black Album. But instead of returning to something I had just written and was relieved to have done with, it seemed easier to write a new piece, with similar themes. This was My Son the Fanatic, a film shot in and around Halifax, starring Rachel Griffiths and Om Puri. Now, with the 20th anniversary of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie approaching, and since The Black Album is set in 1988/9 and concentrates on a small group of religious extremists, we thought my pre-7/7 novel might shed some light on some of the things that have happened since. Not that I had read the novel since writing it; and if I felt hesitant – as I did – to see it revived in another form, it was because I was anxious that in the present mood it might, in places, seem a little frivolous. But the young radical Muslims I came to know at the time did appear to me to be both serious and intelligent – as well as naive, impressionable and half-mad. And it wasn't as if the subject of liberalism and its relation to extreme religion had gone away.

More here.

Take two video games and call me in the morning

From Scientific American:

There has been increasing interest on the possibility that video games may actually induce brain changes that lead to behavioral benefits. A number of applications of computer games have been developed for education and rehabilitation. At least anecdotally, individuals who have played a lot of video games using joy stick controllers in their youth are supposed to make better airline pilots when they grow-up. However, finding that familiarity with the motor skills required to operate a computer or a gaming console conveys advantages for the control of similar technology is not that surprising or exciting. We have long known that practice can make perfect.

A recent study by Daphne Bavelier and colleagues at the University of Rochester offers the intriguing suggestion that playing video games may not only be beneficial because of practicing specific skills, but may also enhance core functions of vision – something that has been classically viewed as immutable as an adult. These investigators have reported that playing certain action video games results in a significant improvement in “visual contrast sensitivity,” a measure of how well an individual is able to discern low-contrast targets. Interestingly, it mattered what type of video game was played. The study group that showed enhancements in contrast sensitivity played “Unreal Tournament 2004” and “Call of Duty 2,” -- both fast-paced and action-oriented games. In contrast, control subjects played games like “The Sims 2,” a visual engaging game of social interactions which is much less demanding in terms of visual attention and visuo-motor coordination.

It seems likely, the study suggests, that the specific characteristics and demands of a video game induce different brain changes and thus promote different behavioral advantages. If action games that train visual scanning and visuo-motor coordination, like “Unreal Tournament 2004” and “Call of Duty 2” result in improved visual contrast sensitivity and improved fine motor coordination, perhaps games like “The Sims 2” or “Warcraft” may be beneficial in promoting empathy or social interaction skills. A careful scientific exploration of such issues may lead to the development of video games and technologies with targeted applications of different cognitive functions and even certain patient populations.

More here.

Five Movements To Watch Out For in Science Fiction

China Mieville in Omnivoracious:

v) Salvagepunk

As Steampunk wheezes and clanks exhausted into the buffers, dragging an increasingly huge load of books behind it, the hunt for the next great somethingpunk is over. The orgy of para-Victoriana has been impressively tenacious, but it has its limits, and rather than yet another reclamation of an earlier mode of production--steam, dust, stone, diesel--the punk aesthetic of DIY, cobbling-together, contrariness, discordance and disrespect for the past will go meta. It will investigate not imaginary branchline points in a timeline (an understandable if rather plaintive discomfort with the idea that such a line was actually teleological, and ended with this bloody mess) but history itself as always-already a bricolage, and what we do about that. Though this might look like apocalypse fiction, it will in fact be not about any implied catastrophe, but about scobbing together of culture from the refuse (and implying that all culture is and always has been so scobbed). An art of making-do, tool-use and ingenuity. A fiction infused with a militant amnesiac uninterest about cultural memes' origins and 'pure' 'original' 'purposes' - which chimeras its adherents will derisively and polysemically render 'pUr(e)poses' - this will be literature that celebrates reclamation, and/but forgets that prefix 're-': so, clamation fiction, ignoring the fact that ruins are ruined, were ever anything else.

If Benjamin warns that history is a buffeted angel staring at a giant pile of debris, Salvagepunk ignores the angel and roots around in the debris looking for a car to hotwire.

Salvagepunk is the most developed of these schools so far: its bards and theorists already exist, and have brilliantly started the job of delineating its contours, and making notes for a manifesto. More than any other of these incipient movements, it will have a recent history of precursors on which to draw, Salvagepunk avant la lettre. These influences include the Mad Max films, The Bed Sitting Room, Charles Platt's Garbage World, Steptoe and Son and the entire musical history of sampling, at all.

Anti-Semitism in Chávez’s Venezuela

Claudio Lomnitz and Rafael Sánchez in Boston Review:

On January 30, 2009 fifteen heavily armed men stormed the Tiferet Israel synagogue in the Mariperez neighborhood of Caracas. They held down two guards, robbed the premises, and desecrated the temple, throwing the Torah and other religious paraphernalia to the floor and painting graffiti on the walls: “Out, Death to All”; “Damned Israel, Death”; “666” with a drawing of the devil; “Out Jews”; “We don’t want you, assassins”; a star of David, an equal sign, and a swastika.

The event, though shocking, was neither isolated nor unprecedented. Over the past four years, Venezuela has witnessed alarming signs of state-directed anti-Semitism, including a 2005 Christmas declaration by President Hugo Chávez himself: “The World has enough for everybody, but some minorities, the descendants of the same people that crucified Christ, and of those that expelled Bolívar from here and in their own way crucified him. . . . have taken control of the riches of the world.”

In late 2004 the police stormed Hebraica, a Jewish social, educational, and sports center, ostensibly to search for guns and explosives. No weapons were found. But finding them may never have been the purpose of the raid: it coincided with the beginning of Hugo Chávez’s official visit to Tehran. Thus, Sammy Eppel, director of the Human Rights Commission of the Venezuelan B’nai B’rith, poignantly interpreted the event: “Chávez was showing Iran: ‘This is how I deal with my Jews.’”

Percontations: System Justification Theory

Communist memory "hotting up" again

In 2002, Charles Maier published an article widely referred to in subsequent debates about historical memory in Europe.[2] He draws a distinction between the "hot" memory of fascist crimes, which still has not faded, and the relatively short-lived, "cold" communist memory, which unavoidably becomes dispassionate with the passing of time. Indeed, while the Holocaust remains the symbol of absolute evil in human history, the horrors of the GULAG and of Stalinist terror, despite being publicly condemned Europe-wide after the collapse of the Soviet empire, have not received comparable institutional recognition (e.g. museums, educational programmes, victim compensation). Convincing as Maier's argument is, evidence has emerged in recent years that necessitates a revision of his thesis, at least the second part of it. After fifteen years of successful transition, culminating in the accession to the EU, it seemed that the accounts of the eastern European countries with the past had finally been closed. Yet what we observe today is that communist memory is "hotting up" again in eastern Europe. Bear in mind the "decommunization" campaign of the Kaczynskis in Poland, where the Institute of National Memory has been turned into an instrument of domestic politics; recall the controversies and political fights about communist memory in Hungary (where in September 2006 rightwing demonstrators staged a "re-run" of the anti-Soviet 1956 revolution); or look at the current conflict around the statue of the Soviet soldier in Tallinn, which caught the attention of both the European and the Russian public and has since even become an issue in EU-Russian relations.

more from Tatiana Zhurzhenko at Eurozine here.

The Swedish dream is no more

The Swedes are coming. As Europe lurches to the right amid financial and climate meltdown, a horde of cool-headed Nordic warriors are riding to the rescue. Sweden's EU presidency from 1 July will be greeted as a breath of fresh air after the Czech leadership, what with the latter's antics on climate change and arousal chez Berlusconi. What the EU needs is a whiff of sense and reason. And who better to provide it than the social-minded, climate-conscious Swedes? Sweden still sets hearts racing across Europe. The "Swedish model" might bring up thoughts of a nubile blonde rather than a strong social state, but it is in the latter incarnation that my home country stirs the passions of left-leaning Europeans. Whatever Sweden does must be right, or so reason progressive politicians and Guardian journalists – not to mention scores of Swedes. But beyond this blue-eyed vision lurks a darker reality. Sweden's conservative coalition government has stood still as the financial crisis has engulfed the country. Jobs, social services and healthcare are eroding. The Sweden Democrats – the equivalent of the BNP – are on the rise. The social state is failing. The Swedish dream is no more.

more from Ruben Andersson at The Guardian here.

sex and banality

King of kitsch, Jeff Koons, comes to the Serpentine Gallery this summer with his first ever solo British show. Work by the American artist, who will be exhibiting his Popeye series at the Serpentine, 'creates a world beyond taste' according to the Guardian's Jonathan Jones. Preview highlights from the exhibition (which runs from 2 July until 13 September 2009), before it opens to the public

more from The Guardian here.

Tuesday Poem

Hymn
Jack Kerouac

And when you showed me Brooklyn Bridge
    in the morning
        Ah God,

And the people slipping on ice in the street
twice,
          twice,
                      two different people
                      came over, goin to work,
                      so earnest and tryful,
                      clutching their pitiful
                      morning Daily News
                      slip on the ice & fall
                      both inside 5 minutes
                      I cried and cried

That’s when you taught me tears, Ah
   God in the morning,
       Ah Thee

And me leaning on the lamppost wiping
eyes,
         eyes,
                       nobody’s know I cried
                       or woulda cared anyway
                       but O I saw my father
                       and my grandmother’s mother
                       and the long lines of chairs
                       and tear-sitters and dead,                        
                       Ah me, I knew God You
                       had better plans than that

So whatever plan you have for me
Splitter of majesty
Make it short
    brief
Make it snappy
    and bring me home to Eternal Mother
    today

At your service anyway,
    (and until)


from: Kerouac - Pomes All Sizes; City Lights Books, 1992

How we survived Iraq

From The Telegraph:

For much of his time in Iraq, the big decision of Patrick Hennessey's day was what to read. While guarding Iraqi detainees, he and young officer friends would lounge around sunbathing in boxer shorts, holding impromptu seminars on the relative merits of The Iliad over Catch 22. When the idealistic Balliol English graduate defied his parents to join the Grenadier Guards, he expected adventure and was disappointed to find it mostly within the covers of books. After he was shifted to Baghdad, that changed: quiz nights alternated with terrifying patrol duties.

Then, in 2007, he was sent to Helmand province where the action was relentless. In one 48-hour push up the Sangin Valley, his team of six, without Afghan support, had to take control of 80 compounds. By the end of the tour, his company of 36 had lost 12 "blokes" – one killed, the rest injured – and three of the six officers had been sent home. Hennessey, one of the youngest captains in the Army, was the only platoon commander left. With each new empty bed in the room, each friend helicoptered out hooked up to a morphine drip, his introspections shifted from the relative merits of Homer and Heller to why he simultaneously longed for and dreaded danger. "Is fighting sexually charged because it is the greatest affirmation of being alive?" asks Hennessey, now a 26-year-old law student in a civvy suit.

More here.

When Money Buys Happiness

John Tierney in The New York Times:

Maybe consumers – especially the ones reading this blog – aren’t so irrational after all. In my Findings column, I describe how the patrons of a restaurant in Israel turned out to be surprisingly immune to the experimental manipulations of behavioral economists. And now there’s more evidence of sensible shopping behavior from an informal (and unscientific) survey of Lab readers. It was conducted in connection with an earlier column about Geoffrey Miller’s new book, “Spent: Sex, Evolution and Consumer Behavior.” Dr. Miller issued an open invitation to readers to try this exercise:

List the ten most expensive things (products, services or experiences) that you have ever paid for (including houses, cars, university degrees, marriage ceremonies, divorce settlements and taxes). Then, list the ten items that you have ever bought that gave you the most happiness. Count how many items appear on both lists.

More than 200 readers responded. Dr. Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico, has read the answers carefully and says he’s impressed with Lab readers’ “good insights, self-revelations and vigorous debate.” He has picked out some of the distinctive answers and identified five overall trends. Here’s Dr. Miller’s analysis, starting with some of the most notable expenditures by Lab readers:

On the “most expensive” lists, the most distinctive items were:

• “Drugs”
• “Psychotherapy”
• “A week at a mental hospital”
• “Wine cellar filled, then emptied. Repeat.”

On the “happiness” lists, the most distinctive items were:

• Thrift store shopping
• Eyeglasses
• Liposuction
• Pilot’s license
• Social club dues, memberships
• Beach house rentals
• Yoga retreat
• Adoption of child
• $25 plain gold wedding band that lasted through a 46-year marriage
• Coffeemaker with auto settings for waking up to fresh coffee
• “Shack in the woods”
• “Studio apartment in Paris”
• “Upgrade to business class on international flights”
• “Girlfriend”
• “Weekend delivery of NY Times”
• “Tire swing”
• “Spleefs” (marijuana)
• “Ant colony”

More here.

The Owls: Multi-Use Area by Elizabeth Bradfield

Multi-Use Area

By Elizabeth Bradfield

Would the day on the hay flats—
sun slight through clouds, grasses
just starting again from last year’s
grasses, geese and cranes bugling
over the marsh—have been better
without  the old tires, the gutted couch
in a pullout, a moose slumped alongside,
meat taken but the head still attached?

I can close my eyes to the pop bottles,
booze bottles, and orange skeet shells
in the parking lot, along the river.  Walk
past them.  I can pretend my own steps
through the marsh convey a different
presence.  But I can’t close my ears.
There, a white-fronted goose, there
a pintail, willow branches cracking

underfoot, F-14s from the base.  And there, again,
the shotgun blast and whoop which I can’t
edit out, which I probably shouldn’t.
It stops when I walk into view.  I stop
and stare across the flats through my
binoculars, thinking asshole. And of course
someone’s staring back at me
over a truck bed, thinking asshole.

*

Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of the books Interpretive Work (Arktoi) and the forthcoming Approaching Ice (Persea). She plasters the streets with collaborations published by Broadsided Press and works as a naturalist. "Multi-Use" was originally published in Interpretive Work (Arktoi/Red Hen Press, 2008), winner of the Audre Lord Award from the Publishing Triangle and shortlisted for the Lambda Literary Award.

Read (or listen to) more of Elizabeth Bradfield's poems here >>

*

The Owls is a literary kind of site devoted mostly to collaborative writing projects. Poems, stories, and essays from The Owls appear on 3QD as a periodical feature.

The Owls site currently hosts a photostream by Frederick Schroeder, "Night Drive," and "Screen Grabs," an occasional column-by-Twitter-feed on movies by Ben Walters. Work by Jim Gavin, Morgan Meis, Amy Groshek, and Jill McDonough has appeared on the site in recent weeks as part of a project called "Stamps" that features writing about places. The Stamps project will continue this summer with a new post each week on The Owls site.

You may receive updates about writing projects at The Owls here at 3QD, via feed, or by putting the word "subscribe" in the subject heading of an email to owlsmag[at]gmail[dot]com.

perceptions

The Humanists: Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep (1977)

by Colin Marshall

It's easy to see Killer of Sheep as a social tract, a cinematic essay on the boredom and hopelessness of black families in crumbling, industrial 1970s Watts — a bit too easy. Though Burnett's best-known film — and for 30 of the last 32 years, a seldom-seen one — provides a window of unparalleled clarity and style into its time and place, to read it as an elaborate argument about the entrapment of the urban black working class is to choose the most convenient but least interesting interpretation. The unambitious film writer can simply parse the images of the title character's endless sheep-skinning toil in the abattoir that employs him as metaphors for the lives of he and his wife, children and friends — grim, desensitizing and doomed — and call it a day. "And thus we see," it's easy to imagine such a (likely non-American) critic pronouncing, "the poor forced into deadening oblivion, as lambs to the slaughter, by the callous society that surrounds them."

Were that truly the extent of the movie's depth, you wouldn't be reading about it here. The "statement film" probably has its place — he admitted, wearily — though fictional cinema has always been a remarkably ineffective forum in which to make an argument, allowing the filmmaker to spread the sheen of truth, at least within their picture's world, on any old flight of fancy. Even documentary film lacks a firm barrier between sound reasoning and unhinged agitprop; it's no accident that the best members of the genre simply observe, casting off the nonsensical obligation to push a thesis. Charles Burnett seems, on some level, to have known this when he made Killer of Sheep, a latter-latter-day piece of neorealism with the aesthetic stylization of that subgenre and the unstaged feel of a nonfiction film.

Given that Burnett originally shot it as his UCLA film school thesis without intent to distribute or even publicly screen, it's all the more impressive to reflect on what the film does — or, to put it more precisely, to reflect on what the film doesn't do. It's a common filmmaker's temptation, especially among the young ones and those embedded in a film school environment, to peddle their own worldview and grind the axe through subtle — or, more often, hilariously yet unintentionally unsubtle — tricks of framing and causality. Either Burnett eschews this practice or performs it so well as to go undetected, though my money's on the former. While their efforts may often end in vain, he never for one moment appears to strip his characters of their agency; at no point do they come off as puppets carrying out a preordained design of modern struggle and malaise.

Continue reading "The Humanists: Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep (1977)"

Monday Poem

As the Minute Clicks
Jim Culleny

A new night
(as they always are)
and cool  —unlike June
in Jersey when I was green
but June anyway

anyway it comes
it’s June
it’s June
regardless of you

June then 
June now
                 in mid-late evening
8:30 by the clock
—the night dark
almost

in the window the sky
glows grey behind
silhouettes of trees

slate-skin clouds
which if seen from a jet
would billow bright
in the light of the torch
that makes us tick

while underneath on
cloud-muffled earth what
makes us tick is a phantom
flame we imagine

we imagine it hints it’s here
right now in June

Brandenburg Concertos
from the other room

fountain water falling
nearby from a stone frog’s lips

cat darting
car passing

makes you wonder how
you’re doing as the minute
clicks

Stamp Your Feet. Hard.

Amelia Vega dancing at Bar Cardamomo, Madrid. All photos courtesy of Randolyn Zinn.

Randolyn Zinn

                                    The way she moves

                                    her slender waist

                                    pleases the eyes

                                    and the soul.

                                                            -- Abu l-Hajjaj ibn ‘Utba, 13th c., Sevilla
                                                                

                                You go scattering,

                                as you walk,

                                roses and lilies.

                                                            -- traditional flamenco Alegrias lyric

In Spain earlier this year, researching a collection of poems I am writing, it occurred to me that my quest to find flamenco puro might be as romantically ill conceived as clambering through the back woods of the Southern United States in search of the blues. A fool’s errand, because both flamenco and the blues share at least one common fate -- professional integration into their respective cultures.

Before my trip, I had visions of coming upon a late night impromptu scene of music and dance in some smoky room in an Andalucían town, aficionados yelling their appreciative ¡olés! (the first syllable is pronounced ah for reasons I’ll get into later).  In fact, I did stay up late watching all manner of flamenco performances in very smoky rooms to learn that the art has become somewhat of a career path, enjoying renewed interest today from artists and audiences not necessarily born in the Andalucían province of its ancestral beginnings. And the pure flamenco I had fantasized about finding proved elusive.

In the Beginning, Complexity Not Simplicity

Even though the word "flamenco" elicits a variety of images and sounds, perhaps cliché -- dark-eyed women in long ruffled dresses clicking castanets and drilling the floor with rapid heelwork, a man hunched over his guitar plying its strings in the plaintive voicings of the ancient Phrygian scale -- the art bears closer scrutiny. Born of strife between Christian, Jew, Gypsy and Muslim, whose ancient shared anguish is mirrored by the challenges of our own era, flamenco is one of the world’s first multi-cultural art forms.

Continue reading "Stamp Your Feet. Hard."

Stonewall’s 40th Eye on the Prize, and the Prez Blinks

by Michael Blim

The bus Thursday night was late. I slumped back onto the bench as the four-hour trip to New York had just gotten longer. As I settled in, I noticed a young kid waiting too. He had a Sesame Street character sticking out of his pink backpack, and he wore pink tennis and a rainbow-colored belt. On the back pocket of his jeans was written “God loves gays.” He might have been eighteen.

Flaunt it, baby, flaunt it, I thought. There’s still a very good chance you’ll get to New York in one piece. We’re almost normal now.

Four and a half hours later, the bus came bounding off the Williamsburg Bridge into Chinatown. It was one o’clock by the time I transferred at West 4^th Street. The C train was no longer running, the A train was stopping at Jay Street, and lovely shuttle buses were offered from thereon. As I boarded the train to Brooklyn, a bunch of drunken young revelers hopped on. They were a mess of plastered and tinted hair, and a few were prettily painted. Kids of several hues once more with rainbows, and these too were all right with the world.

Finally the shock of recognition hit: the Stonewall 40^th Anniversary was coming up Monday, and New York’s big Pride parade was on Sunday.

I had been oblivious. On the long bus ride, I had been reading the U.S. Justice Department’s June 11 brief supporting dismissal of a suit challenging the constitutionality of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). The motion to dismiss will be held this upcoming August 3.

I had been steaming. By the time the A train reached Brooklyn, it was as if I had the taste of Mexican mole negro, the bitter chocolate sauce, in my mouth. Yes, we were free, to which the rainbow kids could testify. But we had not secured our rights. And American society and we had fallen far short of liberation.

The Justice Department brief says it all. The Obama Justice Department brief says it all. I add the adjective “Obama” because even though Andrew Sullivan has noted that the brief’s author W. Scott Simpson is a Bush appointee and part of a trial team that defended the Partial Birth Abortion Act of 2003, Tony West, the Obama-appointed Assistant Attorney General, signed off on the brief. No one has yet called it a mistake.

The brief seeks dismissal of a suit by Andrew Smelt and Christopher Hammer alleging that their constitutional rights are violated by the provisions of DOMA that established for the first time in American history that marriage in the federal system of laws consists of a union between a man and a woman.

The brief is an exercise in deceit and disingenuousness. DOMA merely “codifies” tradition, Justice argues, even if the republic had survived without a federal definition of marriage for over 200 years, and even though marriage is a state and not a federal matter. DOMA, Justice avers, doesn’t prohibit same-sex couples from marrying: it just prevents same sex couples from any claim to benefits based on marriage, and it protects other states from having to provide benefits to same sex marriage partners who leave same sex marriage states and move to states without same-sex marriage.

Continue reading "Stonewall’s 40th Eye on the Prize, and the Prez Blinks"

Wall Street’s Toxic Message: American Capitalism and the 3rd World

Joseph Stiglitz in Vanity Fair:

Among critics of American-style capitalism in the Third World, the way that America has responded to the current economic crisis has been the last straw. During the East Asia crisis, just a decade ago, America and the I.M.F. demanded that the affected countries cut their deficits by cutting back expenditures—even if, as in Thailand, this contributed to a resurgence of the aids epidemic, or even if, as in Indonesia, this meant curtailing food subsidies for the starving. America and the I.M.F. forced countries to raise interest rates, in some cases to more than 50 percent. They lectured Indonesia about being tough on its banks—and demanded that the government not bail them out. What a terrible precedent this would set, they said, and what a terrible intervention in the Swiss-clock mechanisms of the free market.

The contrast between the handling of the East Asia crisis and the American crisis is stark and has not gone unnoticed. To pull America out of the hole, we are now witnessing massive increases in spending and massive deficits, even as interest rates have been brought down to zero. Banks are being bailed out right and left. Some of the same officials in Washington who dealt with the East Asia crisis are now managing the response to the American crisis. Why, people in the Third World ask, is the United States administering different medicine to itself?

Robert Wright's The Evolution of God

Dan Cryer in the Boston Globe:

As a bold formulator he’s also a lightning rod for controversy. “The Evolution of God,’’ which explores permutations in our concepts of the deity, will please neither hard-core atheists nor fundamentalists of any faith. It’s too open to theism for the former, too rooted in scientific rationalism for the latter.

Wright assumes from the outset that religions change. And the most trustworthy means of explaining why is to trust “the facts on the ground’’ - that is, the economic-social-political context. In the final analysis, he emerges as an optimistic materialist. For he concludes that change will eventually tilt toward a more benign global religious environment. Now before you can shout “9/11’’ or “jihad,’’ listen to his argument.

The author traces the growth of gods from the animism of hunter-gatherers (where spirits rule over natural phenomena) to the polytheism of chiefdoms and ancient states (where multiple gods govern every aspect of life). These gods are hardly paragons of right living; they are capricious and often cruel. Over millennia, these models give way to a hierarchy of gods, with a powerful sovereign in charge, and, later yet, to monolatry, in which a city-state or nation bows to a single god considered superior to all others.

Most of the book, however, is devoted to the evolution of God concepts within more familiar precincts of monotheism: the Hebrew and Christian Bibles and the Koran. In the archeology and textual criticism of modern scholars, which Wright cites, these scriptures seldom appear in chronological order. Read in the proper sequence, however, they reveal a record of change.

Allen Buchanan on Enhancement

Over at Philosophy Bites:

Biological enhancement of human beings in a variety of dimensions is now possible. But what are the ethical implications?  Allen Buchanan discusses enhancement in this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast.

Listen to Allen Buchanan on Enhancement