3quarksdaily

The Work of the Moving Image in the Age of its Digital Corruptibility

by Daniel Rourke

"The cinema can, with impunity, bring us closer to things or take us away from them and revolve around them, it suppresses both the anchoring of the subject and the horizon of the world... It is not the same as the other arts, which aim rather at something unreal or a tale. With cinema, it is the world which becomes its own image, and not an image which becomes world."

Giles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement Image

Take 12 images and splice them end to end: a shaded length of acetate through which a bright white light is to be shone. This makes one second of film. The reel spools onwards, as the seconds tick by, and from these independent images (isolations of time separated in space) an illusion of coherence emerges.

During a recent flurry of internet activity I stumbled across the work of Takeshi Murata. His videos, having made their way, legitimately or otherwise, into the mysterious Realm of YouTube, have achieved something of a cult status. Among various digital editing techniques Murata is one of the most famous purveyors of the 'Datamoshed' video. A sub-genre of 'glitch-art', datamoshing at first appears to be a mode of expression fine-tuned for the computer geek: a harmless bit of technical fun with no artistic future. But as I watched Murata's videos, from Monster Movie (2005), through to Untitled (Pink Dot) (2007) I became more and more convinced that datamoshing has something profound to say about the status of the image in modern society. Furthermore, and at the risk of sounding Utopian, datamoshing might just be to film what photography was to painting.

Take a human subject. Any will do. Have them sit several metres from your projection, making sure to note that their visual apparatus is pointing towards, and not away from, the resulting cacophony of images. There is no need to alert the subject to your film. Humans, like most animals, have a highly adapted awareness of movement. Your illusion cannot help but catch their attention. As soon as the reel begins to roll they will be hooked.

Cinema is all pervasive. Not just because we all watch (and love) movies, nor that the narratives emerging from cinema directly structure our modern mythos. Rather it is through the language of cinema, whether we are sat in front of a screen or not, that much of the past hundred years of cultural change, of technological and political upheaval can be understood. For Walter Benjamin, whose writings on media appeared almost as regularly as the images flashed by a movie projector, the technology of film fed into and organised the perceptual apparatus of the modern era.

Continue reading "The Work of the Moving Image in the Age of its Digital Corruptibility"

Monday Poem

The Furnace

Coffee’s made, the tea-water’s on
and here's a glazed pane of iridescent frost
stroked by a ghost etcher’s point
—struck through with silver and laced with light:
its gravure of fern fronds glistens
on a clear silicon plate
...................…………
And there's a brilliant postage stamp of blue
piercing an otherwise stratocumulus dome
marking a bit of sky beyond the frost-etcher’s art:
a frame within a frame a window in a window 
a thought within a name
  ...............................    The furnace sparks 
the burner burns before the blower starts and
warm air rushes from a grate
as if a house might warm its cupped hands
to mitigate the lethal silence of a still cold place
as we will sometimes hunch and blow to mitigate
a frigid shadow stillness:
.....................................a blast of breath
from our own deep furnace in winter
while we wait
………………….
by Jim Culleny, 12/18/09

Don't blow it - good planets are hard to find

by Manisha Verma

After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn't it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked -- as I am surprisingly often -- why I bother to get up in the mornings. - Richard Dawkins

Few nature documentaries have compiled the stunning visuals and demostration of breathtaking scenery and strange creatures on our planet in a footage as cinematically adventurous as the BBC Planet Earth series (2006). Five years in production, over 2,000 days in the field, 40 cameramen filming across more than 200 locations spanning all continents and an unprecedented budget of $25 million is what brought this critcally acclaimed television feat into our homes. The 11 part hi-def nature documentary tells the epic story of life on earth in a way that has never been told before, and happens to be the sole reason why I purchased a Blue Ray player. It was difficult while I was being treated to the rare and spectacular sights that chartered on it, to not be in awe of the scope of the series. As the episodes wore on, my interest in them and the appetite to devour the succeeding ones only advanced.

There is a way that nature speaks, that land speaks. Most of the time we are simply not patient enough, quiet enough, to pay attention to the story.

Continue reading "Don't blow it - good planets are hard to find"

Perceptions

Rolfe Horn. Along the Old Appian Way, Study 3, Rome, Italy. 2005.

More here and here.

Losing the Plot: Habits of the Heart

by Maniza Naqvi 

“We are just props for validating and furthering their policy! We say no to them and they punch us hard and prove their point with another explosion!  Can't you see that?"

"No, jan--I cannot--You have made this a habit--of blaming America for everything!"

"No I have not made it a habit!  Isn’t it curious that every time they make a policy statement—quoting D’Touqueville to us----every time they want to force Pakistan to take a position in their war and Pakistan resists---some sort of a violent event takes place in Pakistan to prove their point? Isn’t that just a little suspect? They are going to increase their troops here—they are going to expand the war into Pakistan—they are going to occupy us---just wait and see!” Zarmeenay had argued, in an urgent tone, her eyes wide and serious as she had packed to leave for Baluchistan. “ We have to stop them Mama.—we have to push back! Amir, Amreekah, Mama! Amir Amreekah!”

“I don’t know Zarmeenay.” Rukhsana had argued with her daughter, “Maybe it’s time we stopped blaming everybody else for all the criminals that have been created right here in Pakistan in the name of religion.’

“Mama! Please—there no such thing as Al Qaeda! There’s no such thing as the Taliban! This is all the same old, same old, overt-covert good old CIA—now breaking up Pakistan—we will have Pushunistan, Baluchistan—Serakiistan—Kashmir, Baluchistan, Karachistan, Sindhistan—just wait. They will do worse to us than what they did to Yugoslavia and the breaking apart of the Soviet Union—just wait---……They will murder all of us!”

“Zarmeenay…”

“Don’t you agree with me Mama, that they killed Benazir Bhutto? They already knew who was her murderer the moment she died? They had decided who to accuse of her murder the day she was murdered? So Benazir is dead, and Baitullah Mesud is dead—But they can’t find Osama Bin Laden in all these ten years of looking for him with all the sophisticated technology that they have?”

“Really! I’m so worried about you darling! Zarmeenay, you are beginning to go too far! I’m scared for you! You talk like this everywhere in public and I’m afraid for you! ” Rukhsana had said to Zarmeenay just before she had left the house.

“Don’t be afraid, Mama. Don’t be afraid! That’s been our main problem we’ve been afraid for too long. It’s too late to be afraid now, we have to take action. We have to save ourselves, our country! You’ll see Mama! I’m right! It’s time to listen to your heart Mama, I’m listening to mine. We have to fight for Pakistan!”

And Zarmeenay had disappeared. Just like that vanished. Now she was dead.

Continue reading "Losing the Plot: Habits of the Heart"

Obama steps up rhetoric on Iran

From Yahoo! News:

The White House on Sunday strongly condemned "violent and unjust suppression" of civilians in Iran, following a fierce government crackdown on opposition protests.

The strongly-worded statement contrasted with careful initial responses by the White House following post-election protests in Iran in June and came as the nuclear showdown between Tehran and world powers reached a critical point.

"We strongly condemn the violent and unjust suppression of civilians in Iran seeking to exercise their universal rights," White House spokesman Mike Hammer said in a statement.

"Hope and history are on the side of those who peacefully seek their universal rights, and so is the United States.

"Governing through fear and violence is never just, and as President Obama said in Oslo -- it is telling when governments fear the aspirations of their own people more than the power of any other nation."

10 Muharram, 1431 A.H.

Once again, on Ashura, the 10th of Muharram, a Yazeedi perversion of Islam in the form of the duplicitous regime in Iran is faced by the brave of that country. Thanks to the lessons of Karbala, the evil side will not win. I guarantee it. But like the original Ashura, a price will be paid in the blood of innocents. Even for a secular person like me, the actions of the courageous youth of Iran are a powerful lesson that while still today, just as in the time of Imam Husain, standing up to tyranny is difficult, there really is no other choice for those with a healthy conscience.

These photos from today are from Tehran 24:

 

 

 

 

 

More here.

Dennis Brutus, 1924-2009

In the NYT:

South African poet and former political prisoner Dennis Brutus, who fought apartheid in words and deeds and remained an activist well after the fall of his country's racist system, has died. He was 85.

Brutus' publisher, Chicago-based Haymarket Books, said the writer died in his sleep at his home in Cape Town on Saturday. He had been battling prostate cancer, according to Patrick Bond, who directs the Center for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Durban, where Brutus was an honorary professor.

Brutus was an anti-apartheid activist jailed at Robben Island with Nelson Mandela in the mid-1960s. He helped persuade Olympic officials to ban South Africa from competition from 1964 until apartheid ended nearly 30 years later.

Born in 1924 in what was then Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, Brutus was the son of South African teachers who moved back to their native country when he was still a boy. He majored in English at Fort Hare University, which he attended on full scholarship, and taught at several South African high schools.

By his early 20s, he was politically involved and helped create the South African Sports Association, formed in protest against the official white sports association. Arrested in 1963, Brutus fled the country when released on bail, but was captured and nearly killed when shot as he attempted to escape police custody in Johannesburg and forced to wait for an ambulance that would accept blacks. Brutus was sentenced to 18 months at Robben Island.

Power in the Streets

Is Iran moving towards dual sovereignty, to borrow a phrase from Trotsky? ("Dual sovereignty" exists at the moment when there are two legitimate but incompatible sources of legitimate power.) Via Andrew Sullivan:

The Daily Nite Owl, Josh Shahryar, has also been live blogging events on this Ashura.

Also see this report from the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran:

An eyewitness told the Campaign that Basij forces attacked protestors near Daneshjoo Park, beating them with batons, wood sticks and metal pipes. He reported that after a protestor’s dead body was moved through the crowd, protestors started to beat back Basijis and brought down several from their motorcycles, setting the vehicles on fire.

“The Basij and special forces were extremely violent. They beat protestors directly on the head. There were many people with bloodied heads and faces. A young protestor was tied to the back of a van and dragged on the asphalt. Protestors attacked the van, took the passengers out and set the van on fire. There were thousands of special forces and Basij members confronting the protestors,” he said.

An eyewitness told the Campaign live shots were fired in Enqelab Street and other eyewitnesses also said live ammunition was used against the protestors at Pol-e College where three people have been reported killed. According to several eyewitnesses, by late afternoon, government forces were busy cleaning and washing blood-covered streets to destroy any signs of the violent confrontations. More protests are expected during the night in Tehran.

Iconography of Karbala

From Dawn:

The following pictures are from a procession taken out in remembrance of the Karbala tragedy on the eve of Ashura in Karachi on Wednesday. Dawn.com takes a look at the various symbols prevalent in Muharram processions in Pakistan. Feature by Salman Siddiqui. Photos by WhiteStar/Fahim Siddiqi.

When Ashura comes, the main streets of Pakistani cities are filled with thousands of mourners. Streetlights turn into posts for black-colored flags as the towering Alams (flags) lead the Muharram procession that include a variety of Taazias and Zuljinah (Imam Hussain's legendary horse) to remember the battle of Karbala that took place 1,300 years ago.

More here.  And my own photos of an Ashura procession in NYC from 2007 are here.

Sunday Poem

“The outsider is the safest and handiest repository for the hate one feels
toward God when one’s life go south."
   --A.R. Spokewell, Hard Times in Paradise: the Immigrant Ruse

Nazis

Thank God they’re all gone
except for one or two in Clinton Maine
who come home from work
at Scott Paper or Diamond Match
to make a few crank calls
to the only Jew in New England
they can find

These make-shift students of history
whose catalogue of facts include
every Jew who gave a dollar
to elect the current governor
every Jew who’d sell this country out
to the insatiable Israeli state

I know exactly how they feel
when they say they want to smash my face

Someone cheated them
they want to know who it is
they want to know who makes them beg

It’s true Let’s Be Fair
it’s tough for almost everyone
to exaggerate the facts
to make a point

Just when I thought I could walk to the market
just when Jean the check-out girl
asks me how many cords of wood I chopped
and wishes me happy Easter
as if I’ve lived here all my life

Just when I can walk into the bank
and nod to the tellers who know my name
where I work who lived in my house in 1832
who know to a penny the amount
of my tiny Jewish bank account

Just when I’m sure we can all live together
and I can dine in their saltbox dining rooms
with the melancholy picture of Christ
on the wall their only consolation
just when I can borrow my neighbor’s ladder
to repair one of the holes in my roof

I pick up the phone
and listen to my instructions

I see the town now from the right perspective
the gunner in the glass bubble
of his fighter plane shadowing the tiny man
with the shopping bag and pointy nose
his overcoat two sizes too large for him
skulking from one doorway to the next
trying to make his own way home

I can see he’s not one of us

by Ira Sadoff

from New American Poets of the ‘90s;
David Godine publisher, Boston, 1991

NOAM CHOMSKY: “Gaza: One Year Later”

Ashura 101

From PBS:

December 18 marked the beginning of the month of Moharram. Shiites, and in particular Iranians, have been mourning the killing of their third Imam, Hossein, the quintessential martyr, since his death in the battle of Karbala on October 10, 680, which falls on Ashura, the 10th day of Moharram. Ashura has been commemorated for at least a thousand years, beginning probably in Baghdad, Iraq, in the 4th Islamic century. Tradition holds that Imam Hossein and 72 of his followers were slain on that day after fighting bravely with the much larger army of the Umayyad Caliph, Yazid ibn Moaaviyeh, which some historians have said was 100,000 men strong.

The death of Imam Hossein, his friends, followers and members of his family by a Sunni Caliph is perhaps the main reason that Shiism is considered a rebellious sect in Islam. Because the Shiites have been a minority throughout the history of Islam, they have transformed the historical battle of Karbala to symbolize ideological confrontation with the ruling elite, and have used a powerful combination of actual events and legend to stir up great emotion; it has been an occasion to complain bitterly about their marginalization in much of the Islamic world and to demand their rights. They invoke Imam Hossein's famous quote that, "Every day is Ashura, and every land is Karbala."

More here.

The Birth and Death of the Cool

From The Washington Post:

This very attractive book, with a cover that subtly recalls a Miles Davis LP from over half a century ago, is a study of how the notion of "cool," with all its elegance and purity, was co-opted by wretched American corporate types who, in true fairy-tale fashion, killed the cool golden goose that they thought was going to lay them golden eggs. To put it more plainly, the author sets up his work with three short biographies of early jazz icons -- Bix Beiderbecke, Lester Young and Miles Davis -- and lays out what he thinks they stood for, both in their music and in the outer world.

Then, in just a few following chapters, he takes some dizzying leaps to places where readers may have trouble following him. Gioia's contention is that the mantle of cool passed all too soon from these aloof, original, extremely gifted musicians to another set of equally iconic but very public figures, such as Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods. Jordan and Woods were hired to endorse Nike and General Motors, who traded on their images to sell running shoes and cars. In an evolution of events that no one expected, "square" personalities like Rush Limbaugh began to intone from the radio, Bob Dole endorsed Viagra, and comparatively unprepossessing contestants like Susan Boyle appeared on "Britain's Got Talent." That, according to the author, signified the end, the death, of the whole idea of "cool." (The term "square" is mine here. Gioia never uses it.)

More here.

Ashura: Fierce Street Protests in Tehran

Six months after the fraudulent elections, the despicable regime is still unable to quell the Irani people's demand for freedom. I am convinced that the days of this brutal government are numbered. This is from CNN:

Fresh clashes broke out between demonstrators and security forces in Tehran on Sunday as large crowds gathered for the climax of the holy period of Ashura.

Since the disputed presidential elections in June, protesters have turned public gatherings into rallies against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was declared the overwhelming winner of the race.

Police, wary of the potential that Ashura gatherings could present, were out in full force Sunday to quell disruptions while demonstrators planned widespread protests.

Near Imam Hussein Square in central Tehran, security forces used tear gas to disperse demonstrators and blocked roads to prevent more from arriving, a witness said.

Protesters seized a motorcycle belonging to a security force member and set it on fire.

The unrest follows day-long clashes between the two sides in the streets of Tehran on Saturday.

On Saturday evening, a pro-government mob barged into a mosque where former president and reformist leader Mohammad Khatami was speaking.

The dozens-strong group forced Khatami to end his remarks abruptly when it interrupted the gathering at Jamaran mosque.

Earlier Saturday, scores of security forces on motorcycles charged protesters on sidewalks whenever they started chanting anti-government slogans, witnesses said.

Baton-wielding security forces bashed and bloodied at least three protesters, arrested at least two people, and smashed the window of at least one car, eyewitnesses said.

More here.

Health Reform: Magnificent Xmas Present But Needs Assembly

Abraham Verghese in The Atlantic:

So its done. The health care legislation has passed and that makes this a special Xmas. Despite its flaws, it is a milestone for a nation that could be so generous with its aid abroad, yet stymied in caring for its own. I clearly could not have been a politician--I would not have the patience of the president to tirelessly campaign for this and to see it through; nor would I have the tenacity of the opponents to the legislation who opposed it to the end.

This morning I will drive in for my rounds at the hospital (my team is on call, bless their hearts,and will stay all day and night, while I get to come home well before nightfall) and I am already trying to digest what this Xmas present means for my patients and for my house staff.  In the last few days we pulled out all stops to get patients home. The ones who can't go home are too ill, and going home may not be an option; instead it might be a specialized nursing facility or rehabilitation place. One or two of these patients have been very much on my mind, long after I leave the hospital, their suffering both palpable and difficult to forget, and making me conscious of the blessings of just walking outside, stepping into a car and going somewhere.

More here.

get the led out

Is there a more mythic band than Led Zeppelin? At the pinnacle of their success, with Robert Plant's hair lighted by stadium lights, they looked like they'd just come down off Mt. Olympus. "Plant," writes Mick Wall in his new book "When Giants Walked the Earth: A Biography of Led Zeppelin," "was tall, blond and looked good enough to eat, a veritable golden god shaking what he'd got -- the perfect visual foil to [Jimmy] Page's darker, more slender, slightly effeminate persona." "When Giants Walked the Earth" devotes a lot of time to this mythic image of the band, telling us about Page's studies of magic and how this shaped their music -- maybe even contributed to the band's decline. It's a hoary cliche, but one has to ask, did Led Zeppelin sell its soul for rock 'n' roll?

more from Nick Owchar at the LAT here.

admired for his brain and detested for his character

No other writer of the 20th century had Arthur Koestler’s knack for doing odd things, crossing paths with important people and being present when disaster struck. As a 27-year-old Communist he spent the famine winter of 1932-33 in Khar­kov, amid millions of starving Ukrainians. Rushing southward through France ahead of the invading Nazi armies in 1940, he ran into the philosopher Walter Benjamin, who shared with him half the morphine tablets Benjamin would use, weeks later, to commit suicide. The Harvard drug guru Timothy Leary gave Koestler psilocybin in the mid-1960s, and Margaret Thatcher solicited his advice in her 1979 election campaign. Simone de Beauvoir slept with him but came to hate him, and in a fictional portrait described a blazing intelligence and a personality capable of sweeping people off their feet. Yet, although he wrote more than 30 books, Koestler is today known primarily, perhaps exclusively, as the author of “Darkness at Noon,” his gripping short novel of Stalinist coercion. The biographer Michael Scammell wants to put Koestler’s multifaceted intelligence back on display and to show that something more than frivolity or opportunism lay behind his ever-shifting preoccupations and allegiances.

more from Christopher Caldwell at the NYT here.

With Ashura One Day Away, the Islamic Republic Trembles

From The Newest Deal:

Ever since Grand Ayatollah Ali Montazeri’s sudden death last Sunday, events in Iran have been unfolding at a dramatic pace, and with Ashura now only a day away, the regime’s fate has never been more uncertain. In fact, Montazeri’s death may end up being the seminal event that takes the Green Path of Hope from being a social movement into becoming a full-fledged and national uprising.

The regime’s handling of the late dissident cleric’s death has had two discernable effects. First, it has only expanded public sympathy for the Green cause, and particularly to a more pious demographic. The shocking disrespect Khamenei showed in his message of "condolence" by saying he would ask God to forgive Montazeri for failing his “momentous test” -- a reference to the falling out the Montazeri had with Khomeini and his eventual renouncement of the Islamic Republic -- has enraged many Iranians. Khamenei, it should be noted, was not even an Ayatollah when he was anointed Supreme Leader after Khomeini’s death. Montazeri, on the other hand, stood alone with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani as the most senior religious authority in the Shia faith. Khamenei's recent delusions of self-grandeur have only made many religious Iranians become cognizant of a truth that Montazeri stated long ago: the Islamic Republic acts anything but Islamic.

The Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) has reportedly recognized just how ill-advised the regime’s blundering actions in the aftermath of Montazeri’s death were. In a letter to the Interior Minister, the council blasts the attack on Ayatollah Taheri’s mourning ceremony in Isfahan, citing the enormous outrage it created after word leaked out and first reached Qom and then to the rest of the country. For a supposed theocracy to be targetting the clerical class is indeed telling of just how desperate (and paranoid) the regime has become.

More here.  [Thanks to Zara Houshmand.]

Pakistan's Trump Card

Robert Dreyfuss in The Nation:

A new round of political upheaval has been triggered in Pakistan, with the Supreme Court's decision to void the National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO) that provided a get-out-of-jail-free card to key civilian leaders of Pakistan. Included among those leaders are its utterly corrupt president, Asif Ali Zardari, and several top officials, including the minister of defense and the minister of interior. Those ministers, and others, have been told by the authorities not to leave town, i.e., they are forbidden to travel abroad, and pressure is on Zardari to resign.

If Pakistan has any hope of breaking the military's stranglehold on power, that hope rests in the civilian parties, including Zardari's Pakistan People's Party -- the party of the late President Bhutto and his daughter, Benazir, Zardari's late wife, who was assassinated on her return from exile -- and the more religious-centered Pakistan Muslim League (N) of the Sharif brothers, including Nawaz Sharif, a former prime minister. Neither the PPP and the Muslim League, however, are true mass-based political parties. Instead, they have become vehicles for the personal and political ambitions of the corrupt families who control them. By default, the leadership of the democratic, civilian movement in Pakistan has fallen instead to the lawyers' movement and to the courts, but it's hard to see how those forces could emerge as a credible political movement that could lead the country. In Pakistan, nominally a democracy, actual democrats are few and far between, and it will take a long time for any of Pakistan's political parties and movements to put down roots and grow into true democratic parties. Meanwhile, it isn't clear that the army will allow that to happen.

More here.  [Thanks to Maniza Naqvi.]

J. M. Coetzee, a Disembodied Man

From The New York Times:

Great men in the winter of their lives often treat the writing of their memoirs as a kind of victory lap, but whatever J. M. Coetzee is after in this third volume of his genre-bending auto­biography, it is not self-­congratulation. The first two volumes, unadornedly titled “Boyhood” and “Youth” (and, in contrast to this one, labeled nonfiction), were marked by Coetzee’s decision to write about himself in the third person. In “Summertime” he takes this schism one bracing step farther, by imagining himself already dead. The book is nominally a kind of rough-draft effort by Coetzee’s own biographer, an Englishman named Vincent, to build the case — through transcribed interviews with lovers and colleagues and other figures mentioned by Coetzee in his “posthumously” opened notebooks — for the years 1971-77 as an especially formative period in the late author’s life, “a period,” as Vincent would have it, “when he was still finding his feet as a writer.”

More here.

Saturday Poem

Looking Around, Believing

How strange that we can begin at any time.

With two feet we get down the street.

With a hand we undo the rose.

With an eye we lift up the peach tree

And hold it up to the wind —  white blossoms

At our feet. Like today. I started

In the yard with my daughter,

With my wife poking at a potted geranium,

And now I am walking down the street,

Amazed that the sun is only so high,

Just over the roof, and a child

Is singing through a rolled newspaper

And a terrier is leaping like a flea

And at the bakery I pass, a palm,

Like a suctioning starfish, is pressed

To the window. We're keeping busy —

This way, that way, we're making shadows

Where sunlight was, making words

Where there was only noise in the trees.

 

by Gary Soto

from New and Selected Poems;
Chronicle Books, 1995.

Can Touching Your Toes Test Your Arteries?

Gretchen Reynolds in the New York Times Magazine:

Sit on the floor with your legs stretched straight out in front of you, toes pointing up. Reach forward from the hips. Are you flexible enough to touch your toes? If so, then your cardiac arteries probably are also flexible.

In the study’s experiment, scientists from the University of North Texas and several Japanese universities recruited 526 healthy adults between the ages of 20 and 83 and had them perform the basic sit-and-reach test described above, although their extensions were measured precisely with digital devices. Taking into account age and gender, researchers then sorted the subjects into either the high-flexibility group or the poor-flexibility group.

Next, using blood-pressure cuffs at each person’s ankles and arms, researchers estimated how flexible their arteries were. Cardiac artery flexibility is one of the less familiar elements of heart health. Supple arterial walls allow the blood to move freely through the body. Stiff arteries require the heart to work much harder to force blood through the unyielding vessels and over time could, according to Kenta Yamamoto, a researcher at North Texas and lead author of the study, contribute to a greater risk for heart attack and stroke.

What the researchers found was a clear correlation between inflexible bodies and inflexible arteries in subjects older than 40.

More here.

The Battle for Israel's Soul

Richard Dawkins: Jeeves and the Family Tree

From RichardDawkins.net:

“But now, Jeeves, mark the sequel. A fellow at the Drones Christmas party was bending my ear last night over the snort that refreshes. Seems there’s a cove called Darwin who says Genesis is all a lot of rot. God’s been oversold on the campus. He didn’t make everything after all. There’s something called evaluation...”

“Evolution sir. The theory advanced by Charles Darwin in his great book of 1859,

“That’s the baby, Jeeves. Evolution. Would you credit it, this Darwin bozo wants me to believe my great great grandfather was some kind of hirsute banana-stuffer, scratching himself with his toes and swinging through the treetops. Now, Jeeves, answer me this. If we’re descended from chimpanzees, why are there chimpanzees still among those present and correct? I saw one only last month at the zoo. Why haven’t they all turned into members of the Drones Club (or the Athenaeum according to taste)? Try that on your pianola, Jeeves.”

More here.

Iran: The Unfolding Gender Revolution

Also on this Christmas, Ziba Mir-Hosseini in MERIP Online:

Iranians of today, from both genders, all classes and all parts of the country, have rejected or at least questioned many of the gender codes and sexual taboos firmly enforced by the Islamic Republic over the past 30 years. So, at least, the current government appears to believe; hence the countrywide Social Morality Plan (tarh-e amniyat ejtema’i) instated by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2006 in an attempt to reimpose the rigid codes of dress and comportment that prevailed in the earliest days of the revolution. Further evidence is provided by several novel elements in the 2009 election campaign and its aftermath.

The first element was the nature of women’s political participation. For a long time, a division, if not an antipathy, between “secular” and “religious” women has marked the politics of gender. The distinction refers to political attitudes, and not personal piety. “Religious” women, in the main, believed that the country’s laws and social norms should be based upon Islam, while “secular” women might be anti-clerical or supportive of complete separation of mosque and state. Many women of all persuasions backed the reformist President Mohammad Khatami (1997-2005), because he promised concrete improvements in women’s lives, but the divide lingered nonetheless. On the eve of the 2005 presidential election, at the end of Khatami’s second term, when secular women’s groups organized a rally in front of Tehran University to ask for equality, framing their demands in constitutional terms, women from the official reformist parties did not join them. They did not want to break all ties with the establishment and to be seen as siding with the newly emerging secular feminists, who for their part were keen to keep their distance from religious reformists.

But in April 2009, 42 women’s groups and 700 individuals, including both secular feminists and religious women from the reformist parties, came together to form a coalition called the Women’s Convergence. Without supporting any individual candidate, the coalition posed pointed questions to the field. They raised two specific demands: first, the ratification of the UN Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women and second, the revision of Articles 19, 20, 21 and 115 of the Iranian constitution that enshrine gender discrimination. Using the press and new media, they put the candidates on the spot to respond. Women’s demand for legal equality became a central issue in the campaign season. Distinguished filmmaker Rakhshan Bani-Etemad made a documentary, available on the Internet, which registers the voices and demands of these women and the replies of the candidates. Ahmadinejad was, of course, the only candidate not to appear.

The second novelty was the appearance of Zahra Rahnavard at the side of -- and even holding hands with -- her husband, the candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi. Though many women politicians have served in the Islamic Republic’s legislature, they had been absent from high-level politics, and the 2009 campaign was the first time that a woman appeared as an equal partner and intellectual match for her man.

A Ceauşescu Christmas

Justin Smith over at his website:

Among the many signs that the Romanian revolutionaries of 1989 were not thinking of the future was their choice of Christmas day, December 25, for the mediatized execution of the deposed president Nicolae Ceauşescu, along with his wife and controller Elena. One consequence is that now, every year, Romanians get to re-watch, on their ubiquitous televisions, alongside the traditional carols and the kitsch revue shows with teenaged girls in sequined leotards and Santa hats, the wrenching military trial and the bloody execution that quickly followed it. This year, the 20th anniversary of the execution, the Romanian television producers are particularly concerned to show the more gruesome parts. The version I saw 'live', as an adolescent, on NBC nightly news, from within the gates of a Palm Springs country club, was highly censored to suit American sensibilities. The reality is that the Romanian revolution of 1989 did not at all ride that wave of 'velvet' transitions of power, of which the Czechoslovak version, with the media-friendly Vaclav Havel at its helm, will always serve as paradigm.

To Lenin we owe the idea, of which Žižek, Badiou, and others have recently made much, that in the course of human affairs there occasionally comes what may be called a true 'revolutionary moment', a moment that changes everything, when, due to circumstances entirely beyond the will of any individual, the perception of the place of authority shifts, and the legitimacy of the old power structure simply evaporates. There is a new tendency to treat these moments as though their happening were a sort of law of nature, and so today many people are wondering why one failed to happen in Iran recently, why, in spite of the anger of the youth and the total delegitimization of the mullahs in the eyes of the rest of the world, the mullahs themselves went right on as smugly convinced of their own legitimacy as ever.

From Man from Mars

By the great Stanisław Lem, translated from the Polish by Peter Swirski in Words Without Borders:

The street sizzled. The clatter of skytrains, the car horns, the rattle of speeding trolleys, the twitter of traffic lights and the massive hubbub of human voices, all seethed in dark blue air, sliced into smithereens by columns of light of all colors and shades. Like giant serpents, endless throngs poured this way and that, filling sidewalks to capacity, lit up by square shop windows and by house lights sinking into the twilight. Freshly watered asphalt hissed under hundreds of car tires. Slithery black and silver bodies of elongated vehicles flitted by, one after another.

Without aim or thought I kept walking, a small indivisible particle pressed into the crowd, letting it carry me like a cork buoyed by waves.

The street breathed, murmured and rumbled, drenching me with cascades of lights and wafts of women's heavy perfumes, sometimes with the acrid sharp smoke of southern cigarettes, other times with the choking sweetness of opium-laced cigars. Neon letters of dimming and illuminating advertisements scampered frenetically up the fronts of buildings, fountains swooshed upward, wisps of flares and fireworks flickered madly, showering the heads in the crowd with their dying glints.

I walked past gigantic portals shimmering with light, past dark storefronts, past sky-high columns of unfamiliar edifices, wedged into the mobile, multilingual mass of people engaged in a perpetual conversation, and yet more alone than on a desert island. Hands in pockets, mechanically I jingled a couple of nickels, my entire fortune.

In Defence of Santa Claus

Gene Stoltzfus in Ekklesia:

Santa Claus was never a big part of my life until I let my white beard grow long. That was twenty years ago. My beard sometimes closes doors for North American Caucasian who think I never got out of the 1960s. But the beard opens more portals to wonderful conversations in places like Viet Nam where they called me Karl Marx.

Elders in Afghanistan admired my beard and apparently trusted me. They addressed me as Baba (Uncle) Noel. Once in Mexico City airport I got stopped eleven times by mothers with young children who wanted their child to meet Senior Noel. It was summer and I didn’t have a single gift to give, not even a piece hard tack candy.

When late November arrives I know I am in for surprise greetings every time I go out. The words from strangers carry positive energy because people have good thoughts about Santa except for children age seven and older who have become suspicious that Santa talk is a ruse and he can’t be trusted to be what they were taught about him.

The home I grew up in acknowledged Santa. We didn’t have a fire place so it was confusing to me how Santa would get into the house by way of a chimney that went to a coal furnace. Somehow he made it and the stockings were full when I awoke on Christmas day. There was at least one small present, an orange and some hard tack candy, not my favourite but I didn’t complain because I didn’t want to stop a good thing.

I first really became aware of the power of Santa and St. Nicholas, during the 1990s when I regularly visited Palestine where Muslims, Jews and Christians alike used my appearance as a conversation starter. When the second intifada (uprising) broke out in 2000 there were violent exchanges between Israelis and Christian villages like Beit Jala, near Bethlehem. In Beit Jala I was seriously introduced to St. Nicholas, their patron saint who gave special protection to the villagers since the 4th century.

The story is that St. Nicholas was a pilgrim to Beit Jala in the years 312-315 and he lived in buildings and caves built by monks a century earlier. The people of Beit Jala told me story after story about how St Nicholas had saved their village over the centuries up to and including modern intifadas.

When Religion and Games Intersect

Michael Thompson in Ars Technica:

Christianity isn't the only religion to appear in games, nor is it the only one where spiritual leaders have been offended by their faith's presentation on consoles and/or PCs. Sony recently learned this with the launch of LittleBigPlanet, which was delayed when it was revealed that one of the game's background music pieces —"Tapha Niang," performed by Toumani Diabate's Symmetrical Orchestra— featured quotes from the Qur'an, the Islamic religion's holy text.

When an Islamic gamer heard the song and noticed some Arabic words from the Qur'an, he verified that he wasn't hearing things and then notified Sony via the company's forums. After pointing out the specific instances of the Qur'an quotes, he explained the problem this represented for Muslims. "We Muslims consider the mixing of music and words from our Holy Quran deeply offending," he explained. "We hope you would remove that track from the game immediately via an online patch, and make sure that all future shipments of the game disk do not contain it."

Sony took the issue very seriously. After investigating the claim, the company wound up delaying LittleBigPlanet's worldwide release for and then releasing a patch that removed the vocals from the song track. Media Molecule, the game's developer, publicly apologized and stated that it the studio felt "gutted" for the controversy it caused.

Funnily enough, this action was loudly criticized by the American Islamic Forum for Democracy. "Muslims cannot benefit from freedom of expression and religion and then turn around and ask that anytime their sensibilities are offended that the freedom of others be restricted," the group said. "The free market allows for expression of disfavor by simply not purchasing a game that may be offensive. But to demand that it be withdrawn is predicated on a society which gives theocrats who wish to control speech far more value than the central principle of freedom of expression upon which the very practice and freedom of religion is based."

Of course, it isn't only religious content from Islam that has wound up getting developers in hot water; recently, on game in particular managed to raise the ire of the Hinduism community. The first PS2 game to be exclusively developed and released in India, Hanuman: Boy Warrior, was criticized by Rajan Zed, the president of the Universal Society of Hinduism.

The Darwin Show

Stephen Shapin in the LRB:

Artists create; scientists discover. That’s our usual understanding of the thing, and scientists – together with some of their philosophical allies – have been in the van of insisting so. (That’s one way in which ‘relativism’ and ‘social constructivism’ are commonly opposed.) If science is discovery and not invention, then it follows that discoverers’ relation to what they reveal is different in both intellectual texture and moral resonance from Mozart’s relation to his operas, Shakespeare’s to his plays, and even Bush’s to his wars. You couldn’t say of Figaro or Lear or the Iraq war that they were waiting there to be ‘discovered’. ‘Something of that sort’ may well have come into being, but an example of ‘something like’ Figaro is Salieri’s Axur, Re d’Ormus or even Abba’s ‘Waterloo’. You don’t necessarily have to construct counter-factual histories to support this sort of sensibility. Scientists are often said to hit on ‘the same’ (or ‘nearly the same’) idea at about ‘the same’ time: Galileo, Scheiner and several others on sunspots; Leibniz and Newton on the calculus; Priestley and Scheele on oxygen; Steven Weinberg and Abdus Salam on electroweak gauge theory; and, of course, Darwin and the undercelebrated Alfred Russel Wallace on evolution by natural selection. Every instance of what has been called ‘simultaneous discovery’ lends credence to the notion that the individual does not matter in the course of science, or matters in a very different sort of way from authorial mattering in the creative arts. Homage to the scientist and to the artist sits astride one of our great cultural faultlines. What is owed to reality, and what to the creative work – even the imaginative, literary and political work – of those who are said to lift the veil of reality’s structural and dynamic secrets?

You can still say, with perfect accuracy, that the Origin is much more than its ‘essential’ theory of natural selection: it is a book, a magnificent theatre of persuasion, ‘one long argument’ (as Darwin called it), supported by masses of arduously compiled evidence, ingeniously organised and vouched for by a special individual, with known special virtues and capacities. (Historical reactions differed even on the recognition of the Origin’s literary qualities: George Eliot sourly considered the book ‘ill-written and sadly wanting in illustrative facts’, lacking ‘luminous and orderly presentation’, and Karl Marx complained about ‘the clumsy English style’.) s Richard Horton observed in a special issue of the Lancet, Darwin’s fame, unlike that of today’s scientists, was ‘based on books … His books were neither summaries nor simplifications: they were the core of his originality.’ Writing books was not, for Darwin, an irritating obligation to report on discoveries: reporting and persuading were, for him, seamlessly joined creative acts. He liked writing and took enormous pains in composition; he cared deeply about its power and effects on readers. Whatever might be meant by the ‘essence’ of evolution by natural selection is something you could say was discovered: the text called the Origin was composed, in exactly the same sense that Figaro was composed, artfully put together, invented.

Americans Are Hell-Bent on Tyranny

Sometimes, even Paul Craig Roberts has a point. In Chronicles:

Obama’s dwindling band of true believers has taken heart that their man has finally delivered on one of his many promises—the closing of the Guantanamo prison. But the prison is not being closed. It is being moved to Illinois, if the Republicans permit.

In truth, Obama has handed his supporters another defeat. Closing Guantanamo meant ceasing to hold people in violation of our legal principles of habeas corpus and due process, and ceasing to torture them in violation of U.S. and international laws.

All Obama would be doing would be moving 100 people, against whom the U.S. government is unable to bring a case, from the prison in Guantanamo to a prison in Thomson, Ill.

Are the residents of Thomson despondent that the U.S. government has chosen their town as the site on which to continue its blatant violation of U.S. legal principles? No, the residents are happy. It means jobs.

The hapless prisoners had a better chance of obtaining release from Guantanamo. Now the prisoners are up against two U.S. senators, a U.S. representative, a mayor and a state governor who have a vested interest in the prisoners’ permanent detention in order to protect the new prison jobs in the hamlet devastated by unemployment.

Neither the public nor the media have ever shown any interest in how the detainees came to be incarcerated. Most of the detainees were unprotected people who were captured by Afghan warlords and sold to the Americans as “terrorists” in order to collect a proffered bounty. It was enough for the public and the media that the defense secretary at the time, Donald Rumsfeld, declared the Guantanamo detainees to be the “780 most dangerous people on earth.”

Rice

Jhumpa Lahiri in The New Yorker:

My father, seventy-eight, is a methodical man. For thirty-nine years, he has had the same job, cataloguing books for a university library. He drinks two glasses of water first thing in the morning, walks for an hour every day, and devotes almost as much time, before bed, to flossing his teeth. “Winging it” is not a term that comes to mind in describing my father. When he’s driving to new places, he does not enjoy getting lost. In the kitchen, too, he walks a deliberate line, counting out the raisins that go into his oatmeal (fifteen) and never boiling even a drop more water than required for tea. It is my father who knows how many cups of rice are necessary to feed four, or forty, or a hundred and forty people. He has a reputation for andaj—the Bengali word for “estimate”—accurately gauging quantities that tend to baffle other cooks. An oracle of rice, if you will.

But there is another rice that my father is more famous for. This is not the white rice, boiled like pasta and then drained in a colander, that most Bengalis eat for dinner. This other rice is pulao, a baked, buttery, sophisticated indulgence, Persian in origin, served at festive occasions. I have often watched him make it. It involves sautéing grains of basmati in butter, along with cinnamon sticks, cloves, bay leaves, and cardamom pods. In go halved cashews and raisins (unlike the oatmeal raisins, these must be golden, not black). Ginger, pulverized into a paste, is incorporated, along with salt and sugar, nutmeg and mace, saffron threads if they’re available, ground turmeric if not. A certain amount of water is added, and the rice simmers until most of the water evaporates. Then it is spread out in a baking tray. (My father prefers disposable aluminum ones, which he recycled long before recycling laws were passed.) More water is flicked on top with his fingers, in the ritual and cryptic manner of Catholic priests. Then the tray, covered with foil, goes into the oven, until the rice is cooked through and not a single grain sticks to another.

More here.

 

Friday Poem

A Carol for the Children

God rest you merry, Innocents,
Let nothing you dismay,
Let nothing wound an eager heart
Upon this Christmas day.

Yours be the genial holly wreaths,
The stockings and the tree;
An aged world to you bequeths
Its own forgotten glee.

Soon, soon enough come cureller gifts,
The anger and the tears;
Between you now there sparsely drifts
A handful yet of years.

Oh, dimly, dimly glows the star
Through the electric throng;
The bidding in temple and bazaar
Drowns out the silver song.

The ancient altars smoke afresh,
The ancient idols stir;
Faint in the reek of burning flesh
Sink frankincense and myrrh.

Gaspar, Balthazar, Melchior!
Where are your offerings now?
What greetings to the Prince of War,
His darkly branded brow?

Two ultimate laws alone we know,
The ledger and the sword --
So far away, so long ago,
We lost the infant Lord.

Only the children clasp His hand;
His voice speaks low to them,
And still for them the shining band
Wings over Bethlehem.

God rest you merry, Innocents,
While innocence endures,
A sweeter Christmas than we to ours
May you bequeath to yours.

by Ogden Nash

Conceptualizing Small

From Harvard Magazine:

The nanoscale world is the realm of the truly small. One nanometer is a billionth of a meter, about 100,000 times thinner than the sheet of paper on which these words are printed. If you could shrink to that height, atoms would be from ankle- to waist-high, and a single molecule would wiggle and jump as you watched an electron pass through. The ridges of an old 33-rpm vinyl recording would rise before you like mountain ranges (pictured on this page, several tracks from the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby”). You would quickly realize that objects and forces from your new vantage point are not just quantitatively smaller, but qualitatively different. Matter at that scale sometimes defies classical, Newtonian physics. Light is seen to be both a wave and a particle. Caged electrons tunnel through atoms-thin walls, releasing energy as they escape confinement. Proportionally, surface area becomes vastly larger and more important than volume, leading to significant changes in physical properties.

More here.

Jingle Bell - Punjabi Tadka

It's the 368th Newton's Day!

 

Portrait of Sir Isaac Newton by Sir Godfrey Kneller

This is the sixth celebration of Newton's Day here at 3QD. Richard Dawkins and I independently and simultaneously came upon the idea of celebrating December 25th as Newton's Day in 2004, and each year since then I have written a little something about Sir Isaac. Here are my posts from 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008.

Today, instead of focusing on his science as I have done in years past, I would like simply to present the excellent BBC documentary, Newton: The Dark Heretic, which examines what many people do not know much about: Sir Isaac's dogged investigations into alchemy. The following is the BBC's description of the program:

Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) is widely regarded as the greatest scientist in the history of the world. A physicist, mathematician, astronomer, philosopher and theologian, one of Newton's works, "Philosophia Naturalis Principia Mathematica" (1687), is considered to be the most influential book in the history of science. Yet relatively few people are aware of Newton's very serious pursuit into alchemy and the esoterica, the practice of which would have been deemed heretical in his day.

Beautifully written and directed, with fantastic acting and costume, "Newton: The Dark Heretic" (2003) explores Newton's alchemical endeavours, revealing a man few would recognise. Many of Newton's private manuscripts are examined, which paint a very spiritual man who was absolutely consumed with unraveling the mysteries of the universe, a pursuit which would ultimately push him to the brink of insanity.

Runtime: 00:59:01

Enjoy. (And best wishes and good health to all!)

A Small Gift to the People of Pakistan

 

Pakistan's founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, was born on December 25, 1876

Hello,

3 Quarks Daily readers have raised $1,085 for Todd Shea's charitable organization SHINE PAKISTAN / CDRS.

Here is an alphabetical list of the contributors who gave me permission to publish their names:

1. Shehla Anjum
2. Namit Arora
3. Bennett Berke
4. Aatish Bhatia
5. Jim Culleny
6. Carla Goller
7. Elatia Harris
8. Georg Hofer
9. Ali Asim Khan
10. Asim Munshi
11. H. M. Naqvi
12. Margit Oberrauch
13. Edward Barnes Rackley
14. Syed Abbas Raza
15. Syed Javed Raza
16. Pimpuk Sansuth

There were ten others who prefer to remain anonymous, but also donated very generously. Many thanks to all of you.

It particularly touches me that there were almost as many Indians as Pakistanis who gave money to a Pakistani charity, showing that, at least among 3QD readers, the spirit of Indo-Pak friendship is alive and well. This makes perfect sense to me as my own best friend (and 3QD colleague), Robin Varghese, is Indian. Perhaps we'll raise money for a charity in India next year in the same spirit!

Best wishes to you, Todd, and keep up the good work! I'll send the money later today.

And best wishes to everyone else too!

Abbas

heat and snow miser

left vs. right .... brain

There is something magnificent about the ambition of Iain McGilchrist's book. It offers nothing less than an account of human nature and Western civilisation as outcomes of the competition between the human brain's asymmetrical halves. Thus baldly described, the endeavour doubtless seems implausible at least. Before jumping to that conclusion, though, you should know that this is a beautifully written, erudite, fascinating and adventurous book. It embraces a prodigious range of enquiry, from neurology to psychology, from philosophy to primatology, from myth to history to literature. It goes from the microstructure of the brain to great epochs of Western civilisation, confidently and readably. One turns its five hundred pages - a further hundred are dense with notes and references in tiny print - as if it were an adventure story. And in one good sense it is. All the way through there is a single recurrent theme like a drumbeat, a theme McGilchrist thinks we urgently need to understand and do something about. It is that once we understand the structure and function of the brain, we see that the wrong half of it is in charge of our civilisation.

more from A C Grayling at Literary Review here.

Breakthrough of the Year: A Tale of Two Paleontologists

From Science:

In the 2 October issue of Science, an international and multidisciplinary team co-led by Tim White of the University of California, Berkeley, unveiled the oldest known skeleton of a potential human ancestor as well as information about its living environment. Found in the Middle Awash in the Afar region in Ethiopia, the 4.4-million-year-old skeleton became known as Ardipithecus ramidus, or Ardi for short. The discovery of the fossils was reported in 1994, but it was 15 years before the team presented its results to the world in 11 research papers.

Some of that work, at the time of the discovery and since, has been done by early-career scientists, which raises some interesting career-related questions: How do you become involved in such important research? What's it like? And how does working on such a project affect your career? To investigate these questions, Science Careers profiles two scientists involved in the Ardi project.

Faysal Bibi: Launching your own excavation team

Born in Beirut, Faysal Bibi, 29, traveled extensively as a child. His travels sparked an early interest in "the discovery of cultures, as well as the history and the diverse biological backgrounds" of people, he says. While an anthropology undergraduate at the University of California (UC), Berkeley, Bibi took an interest in the search for the most ancient human origins and the study of human bones, volunteering for archaeological fieldwork in Honduras and learning how to analyze vertebrate fossils in the lab of Anthony Barnosky. When "I got my hands dirty for the first time with fossils, I discovered something that I really enjoyed," he says.

More here.

Sweet Sixteen (for Sheherzad Preisler)

Doctors push opposing views on health care bill

Paul West in the Baltimore Sun:

[Dr. Michael] Gloth and [Dr. Zaneb] Beams differ sharply over how best to fix a system that each sees as badly broken. Perhaps surprisingly, given their opposing views, they have more than a little in common.

Idealistic and hard-working, they grew up in local households tied to the business of medicine. Somehow, each finds time to fit political activism into a busy life as a full-time doctor and parent of young children.

Beams, 37, a pediatrician from Ellicott City, is trying to mobilize practicing physicians - individuals not normally given to political activism - around issues such as changing the way doctors are paid.

"Obviously, I get to solve small problems here every day," she said in an interview at her Columbia office. "But I've always been interested in the bigger picture as well."

Last winter, she joined Doctors for America, an outgrowth of a physicians group from Barack Obama's presidential campaign. She e-mailed her personal contact list, asking physician friends to sign an online petition that was designed to draw them into the political process. When more than 1,000 replies came back within 36 hours, the group gave her a leadership position. She's now organizing doctors in Maryland and eight other states as a deputy field director.

More here.

the acoustics of a mushroom cloud

"A Noiseless Flash" is how journalist John Hersey titled the first chapter of Hiroshima, his much-praised 1946 account of the detonation of the atomic bomb. Though witnesses some twenty miles away claimed that the explosion was as loud as thunder, none of the survivors interviewed by Hersey recalled hearing "any noise of the bomb." Rather, they experienced a blinding flash of light and sudden swells of pressure. Destruction has its ready-made catalogue of images, but we rarely think about the acoustics of a mushroom cloud or falling towers. Steve Goodman's Sonic Warfare is a vital contribution to how we theorize the relationship between sound and politics, and its central argument echoes Hersey's reportage: You need not hear a sound in order to feel it. Dissatisfied with traditional examinations of politicized sound pegged to music—a catchy protest song, a discordant blast of countercultural noise—and the role of human perception, Goodman focuses on frequencies, rhythms, vibrations, sonic-boom-inducing "sound bombs," and in-audible, high-frequency repellants used to quell rowdy teens. For Goodman, discussing the politics of sound demands that we move beyond conventional ideas of audience and reception. Even the ugliest song is recognizable as music—good or bad. Goodman is interested in sound as force.

more from Hua Hsu in Bookforum here.

living someone else’s dream

Who could resist the charms, or doubt the importance, of a liberal, secular, Turkish Muslim writing formally adventurous, learned novels about the passionate collision of East and West? Orhan Pamuk is frequently described as a bridge between two great civilisations, and his major theme – the persistence of memory and tradition in Westernising, secular Turkey – is of a topicality, a significance, that it seems churlish to deny. His eight novels, the most recent of which, The Museum of Innocence, has just appeared in English, perform formal variations on that theme. Though his work fits into a Turkish tradition most closely associated with the mid-20th-century novelist Ahmet Tanpinar, one needn’t know anything about Tanpinar, or even about Turkish literature, to appreciate Pamuk, who writes in the Esperanto of international literary fiction, employing a playful postmodernism that freely mixes genres, from detective fiction to historical romance. Much of Pamuk’s fiction reads like a homage to his Western models: Mann, Faulkner, Borges, Joyce, Dostoevsky, Proust and – in The Museum of Innocence, the tale of a doomed, obsessional love affair between a man in his thirties and an 18-year-old shop girl – Nabokov. Indeed, his affection for the European tradition is as crucial to his appeal as his Turkishness, and his books pay tribute to values deeply embedded in the liberal imagination: romantic love freed from the fetters of tradition; individual creativity; freedom and tolerance; respect for difference.

more from Adam Shatz at the LRB here.

To be a Muslim in India today

Harsh Mander in The Hindu (via bookforum):

"In so many ways, I feel reduced to a second class citizen in my own country, only because of my Muslim identity. I fear we are losing every day the India we love.”

These words, with small variations, echoed in many diverse voices from far corners of the country. In a national meet on the status of Muslims in India today, organised by Anhad in Delhi from October 3 to 5, 2009, many individuals and representatives of organisations gathered from several parts of India. They spoke of negotiating life, relationships, work and the State as members of the largest religious minority in India. The predominant mood in these intense deliberations, which continued late into the evenings, was of sadness and disappointment, and of growing despair. Muslim citizens shared their mounting disillusionment with all institutions of governance, and more so with the police and judiciary, as well as with political parties and to some extent the media, and of a sense of fear that never goes away.

There is, on the one hand, the constant dread of being profiled as a terrorist, or of a loved one being so profiled, with the attendant fears of illegal and prolonged detention, denial of bail, torture, unfair and biased investigation and trial, and extra-judicial killings. There is, on the other hand, the lived experience of day-to-day discrimination, in education, employment, housing and public services, which entrap the community in hopeless conditions of poverty and want. This is fostered in situations of pervasive communal prejudice in all institutions of the State, especially the police, civil administration and judiciary; and also the political leadership of almost all parties; large segments of the print and visual media; and the middle classes, and the systematic manufacture of hate and divide by communal organisations.

One Man's Meat: Robert Wright and Christopher Hitchens Go at It On Religion

Bestselling authors of the decade

From The Telegraph:

The top 100 authors dominate sales. As The Bookseller has explained, some 100,000 titles are published every year, but these authors account for £1 in every £6 spent on books and a fifth of revenue. J K Rowling, who has seven of the decade’s top 10 bestsellers, sold 29 million books with a sales value of £215 million, but Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code was the bestselling book of the decade, selling 5.2 million copies to 4.4 million for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Nielsen has also charted the top 100 books of the decade. After Rowling and Brown, Mark Haddon (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, two million copies) was the most successful author, followed by Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything, 1.75 million), Robert Atkins, and Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, the highest book selected by Richard and Judy. Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots and Leaves was in the top 10 non-fiction bestsellers and Gillian McKeith’s You Are What You Eat outsold Jamie Oliver’s highest seller.

Author Volume sold Value

1 J K Rowling 29,084,999 £225.9m

2 Roger Hargreaves 14,163,141 £26.6m

3 Dan Brown 13,372,007 £74.1m

4 Jacqueline Wilson 12,673,148 £69.9m

5 Terry Pratchett 10,455,397 £77.2m

6 John Grisham 9,862,998 £65.9m

7 Richard Parsons 9,561,776 £49.2m

8 Danielle Steel 9,119,149 £51m

9 James Patterson 8,172,647 £53.8m

10 Enid Blyton 7,910,758 £31.2m

More here.

Decades of future science

From MSNBC:

Cloud science? Solar-power primacy? Affordable clean-energy cars? Space colonies? Super-centenarians galore? These are some of the visions put forward for the next 50 years in science and technology. The past 50 years have set a precedent of sorts for the next half-century: Back in 1960, folks may have assumed their children would be riding rockets to other planets, finding signs of alien life and interacting with intelligent machines - all of which are featured in Arthur C. Clarke's "2010: Odyssey Two" as well as the film based on the book.

The issues that scientists and engineers faced from then up to now have turned out to be more complex than they seemed in 1960. Getting to the moon wasn't a sustainable proposition, and right now it's not clear when anyone will ride a U.S.-made rocket out of Earth orbit again. The evidence for life or even livability beyond Earth is still not in hand, although there have been tantalizing hints from Mars. And for better or worse, machines have not yet reached anything close to HAL 9000's level of intelligence. That doesn't mean scientists have been standing still: In some ways, we've come farther in the past half-century than we did in any previous century - as evidenced by this 50-year timeline of discovery. Among the leading fields have been medicine and genetics, information technology and cosmology.

In the next 50 years, we may well fall short of the breakthroughs we expect - but unexpected discoveries will pop up to keep life interesting. Here are a few of your predictions for the next decade and the next half-century:

Jeff Simmons, San Diego: Augmented reality (textual/graphical information superimposed over reality) will become an integral part of our lives. Once interfaces such as glasses, windshields and other mobile surfaces become display technologies connected wirelessly to mobile devices (think smartphones on steroids) we will come to depend on this flow of just-in-time information: Want to work on your car's engine? View a schematic that gives you the part's location and the steps to carry out. Looking at a product? See comparative pricing and reviews. Looking at a piece of art? Learn more about the artwork and the artist. Looking at a person you've met before? See their name, where you last met, birthdate, etc. ... and the list goes on.

More here.

Wednesday Poem

Men and Death

Men charge around on earth, in air,
smashing Death to smithereens,
and yet pretending It's not there,
sun-struck, forever in their teens.

Women, to propagate the race,
love foolish men (and so they must),
have mud more often in their face,
go down more easily to dust.

by Luann Landon

publisher: Mezzo Cammin, Val 4, Issue 1