James Joyce: A Classic Review

Harry Levin in The Atlantic Monthly:

[Ed. note: This review -- which first ran in the pages of the Atlantic Monthly, December, 1946 -- covers three books, Ulysses; Finnegan's Wake, andA Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.]

Those who confuse a writer with his material find it all too easy to make a scapegoat out of Joyce. They make Proust responsible for the collapse of France because he prophesied it so acutely; and, because Joyce felt the contemporary need to create a conscience, they accuse him of lacking any sense of values. Of course it is he who should be accusing them. His work, though far from didactic, is full of moral implications; his example of aesthetic idealism, set by abnegation and artistry is a standing rebuke to facility and venality, callousness and obtuseness. Less peculiarly Joycean, and therefore even more usable in the long run, is his masterly control of social realism, which ingeniously springs the varied traps of Dublin and patiently suffers rebuffs with Mr. Bloom. The heroine of Stephen Hero, who has almost disappeared from the Portrait, says farewell after "an instant of all but union." By dwelling upon that interrupted nuance, that unconsummated moment, that unrealized possibility, Joyce renews our apprehension of reality, strengthens our sympathy with our fellow creatures, and leaves us in awe before the mystery of created things.

More here.

When the Senses Become Confused

From The New York Times:

A year and a half after the stroke, caused by a lesion the size of a lentil in a region of her midbrain, Dr. Roush began to feel tingling on her body in response to sounds. Today, more than ever, she feels sounds on her skin. The first time it happened, Dr. Roush was channel-surfing when she heard the voice of an announcer on a local FM station. When the announcer started to talk, she recalled, “I felt an unpleasant sensation on my left thigh, left arm, the back of my shoulder and even the outside of my left ear.”

“It was the kind of icky feeling that uniformly washes over you at a scary movie,” she continued. “I had to stop listening. It made me cringe.” Tony Ro, a psychologist from Rice University who has followed her case from the beginning, said Dr. Roush has a rare case of acquired synesthesia. Synesthesia is a condition marked by odd mixings of the senses. Sensory areas of the brain that do not normally communicate engage in cross-talk. Most synesthetes are born with such crossed connections. Some experience complex tastes, like apple or bacon, in response to words. Others feel complex shapes, like pyramids, in response to tastes. Many see colors attached to specific letters or numbers. In this case, Dr. Ro said, the crossed wiring developed as a consequence of the stroke.

More here.

Mortals! Rejoice at so great an ornament to the human race!

The title of this post is a translation of a Latin inscription on Sir Isaac Newton's tomb. This is the fourth year that we at 3QD celebrate the auspicious 25th day of December as Newton's Day, an idea that we coincidentally came to independently on the same day as Richard Dawkins proposed it. (Newton was born 365 years ago today.) Each year I have given some small snippet about Newton's life (previous years' posts here, here, and here in chronological order) and this year I'll present a simple experiment that changed our understanding of the nature of light. Even though Newton had done the experiment in 1666, he did not publish it as part of his first major bit of scientific writing until 1672. In fact, just as in a more fair world (with a more fair academy in Oslo!) Einstein should have won four Nobels for the work he published as a 26 year-old in 1905 (the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, special relativity, and the derivation of the law of the equivalence of mass and energy, E=mc2, from the equations of special relativity), Newton's achievements of the summer of 1666 (which caused Murray Gell-Mann to joke about that annus mirabilis that Sir Isaac could have written quite a "What I did on my summer vacation" essay!) were no less astounding: the law of gravitation, the laws of motion, the work on optics, and the invention of the calculus!

In addition, Newton refined Galileo's notion of scientific method to the point where it is basically indistinguishable from a modern statement of it by a scientist today. He writes in the Opticks:

As in mathematics, so in natural philosophy, the investigation of difficult things by the method of analysis, ought ever to precede the method of composition. This analysis consists in making experiments and observations, and in drawing general conclusions from them by induction and admitting of no objections against the conclusions, but such as are taken from experiments, or other certain truths. For hypotheses are not to be regarded in experimental philosophy. And although the arguing from experiments and observations by induction be no demonstration of general conclusions; yet it is the best way of arguing which the nature of things admits of, and may be looked upon as so much the stronger, by how much the induction is more general. And if` no exception occur from phenomena, the conclusion may be pronounced generally. But if` at any time afterwards any exception shall occur from experiments, it may then begin to be pronounced with such exceptions as occur. By this way of analysis we may proceed from compounds to ingredients, and from motions to the forces producing them; and in general, from effects to their causes, and from particular causes to more general ones, till the argument ends in the most general. This is the method of analysis: And the synthesis consists in assuming the causes discovered, and established as principles, and by them explaining the phenomena proceeding from them, and proving the explanations.

Now just look at the elegant simplicity of this beautiful experiment that Newton performed with just two prisms and a convex lens. This is from a University of California, Riverside, physics webpage:

Newton's first work as Lucasian Professor was on optics. Every scientist since Aristotle had believed light to be a simple entity, but Newton, through his experience when building telescopes, believed otherwise: it is often found that the observed images have colored rings around them (in fact, he devised the reflecting telescope to minimize this effect). His crucial experiment showing that white light is composite consisted in taking beam of white light and passing it through a prism; the result is a wide beam displaying a spectrum of colors. If this wide beam is made to pass through a second prism, the output is again a narrow beam of white light. If, however, only one color is allowed to pass (using a screen), the beam after the second prism has this one color again. Newton concluded that white light is really a mixture of many different types of colored rays, and that these colored rays are not composed of more basic entities.

So, once again, Happy Newton's Day to all!

Lunar Refractions: Happy PC Holidays

Happy Holidays, dear Reader. Yes, I seem always to get stuck with the holidays (Labor Day, Christmas, and whatever might come next…), hence you get stuck reading me—if, in fact, you read on such supposed holidays.

Kindly note that I’m using PC in my title to refer to Personal Computer, not Politically Correct. See, if you’re reading me now, you’re most likely doing so on a personal computer. I have nothing to say about political correctness between the Winter Solstice, Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Eid, and any other holiday one might celebrate this season. But if you’re here, there’s little chance you’re with relatives, family, etc. and if you are, you’re ignoring them in favor of this little screen in front of you. That’s what intrigues me. I’ve traveled several hours, and am in the house I grew up in, sleeping in the bed I grew up sleeping in, walking through the woods I grew up walking through. Although nothing much seems to have changed, I have, and my way of interacting with all this has as well. I now sit at a little laptop, with four family members in the same room, and all of us have our attention absorbed in the little screens before them. This intrigues me.

Two weeks ago I carried out and presented a little art project. If this sounds diminutive, it should. I was taking a seminar in “combined media;” flying in the face of most programs, there was a relatively precise assignment for the final critique: everyone was to prepare a site-specific project.

Site-specific: as in, after the minimalists; as in, after Rosalind Krauss’s 1979 Sculpture in the Expanded Field; as in, all those works and ideas I’d heard of but never really thought about. Initially, I tried to think of it as a great opportunity—to do research, to try something outside my comfort zone. Fairly soon I simply had to admit it was just a pain in the ass: what did site mean, anyway? Let alone what specific could have meant. And that’s when I realized I was unbelievably lucky; I was being asked to do something I’d never have volunteered for, but could use to step out of my regular practice, run a real risk, and try something new.

Being a word-oriented gal, I began asking myself what those two terms could mean, and how they could be interpreted in a more creative fashion. Nothing came. After three thesauruses and my trusted OED, still nothing came. And that’s when I made a joke and my brilliant companion rose to the occasion: in jest I discussed wanting to create an utterly non-existent project, an experience, something people would be part of but that would leave no trace, something fleeting and pointed and contemporary and temporary—something like a text message.

*******

Admittedly, I was indebted to a colleague of mine who had presented the previous week. In a brilliant critique of academia, he had written out his previous critique as a script; it ended up literally looking like a theatrical script, with the colleague-characters’ names preceding whatever riveting or banal thing they had said in reaction to his latest works. Those latest works (five small paintings and one larger painting) were represented by tape outlines applied to the wall at the beginning of his final critique. Thus it became a complete, and quite engrossing, performance: he’d recruited three other colleagues to make the masking-tape outlines of six rectangles on the wall, and then handed out printed scripts to all the people who’d spoken during his last crit, who then had to recite their part. This became hilarious when one recited—verbatim—his comment that “the taping is shitty,” critiquing the fuzzy outline of several areas throughout the canvas. The last—and perhaps most important—detail is that the scripted dialogue was written from his memory, not from any recording. I picked up on that when I saw that a few peoples’ comments, including my own, weren’t included, and hence they didn’t get to recite their part.

Aside from being remarkably clever, that piece got me thinking about various sorts of site and space, especially memory as space. His performance was held in the room adjacent to the one where the previous crit had been held; the works we were looking at were blank rectangles roughly the size of the actual paintings we’d looked at before, but were empty, prompting us to conjure up our visual memories of the pieces. The fact that he wrote the script from memory meant that the real space—of the recitation and the supposedly visual work being discussed—was all in our heads.

So I discussed my trepidation about the site-specific project with my companion, described the above project, and began to brainstorm. He’d made a political poster stating that a certain thing would happen at a certain time, and left a blank for the certain place it would happen to be filled in by hand—making a curiously site-specific poster edition by leaving site entirely out of it. But I didn’t care to steal his work, so thought of my own relations to this theme. Although I hardly ever gave site or space a second thought, one of my earliest pertinent memories was the way my brother and I would always divide space as children: in our parents’ car we would stake out our claims, using our index finger to draw an invisible line through the middle of the seat and telling one another not to cross into territory that wasn’t ours. The same happened at an even younger age when we shared the bathtub, and floating bathtub toys: any toy or toe that strayed onto the other’s side was the other’s to do with as he liked. This translated into site as territory, and I considered dividing Manhattan along 42 Street with a chalk line or string, referring to these ancient territorial disputes and the fact that the view of the island from my neighborhood perfectly bisects it along that cavernous line between the surrounding skyscrapers. Deciding that wasn’t very feasible or interesting (and being a regrettably practical-minded gal as well), we considered unwinding a spool of thread through the corridors and stairways of the studio building, still referring to territory and division, but also referencing the idea of a loop and of being traced, or chased. None of these seemed at all inspiring.

Thus uninspired by the task at hand, and admittedly discouraged by a recent bureaucratic nightmare related to some other work I’d recently shown, I decided I wanted my solution to be utterly non-existent, physically speaking, and yet very present. I wanted it to make people think about the site they were in, specifically. I wanted to do so through no physical means, and over time. I’d recently seen the Tino Sehgal piece at Marian Goodman, which I found very thought provoking, albeit problematic (and too lengthy to discuss here, but do go see it if you can). So I ventured to provoke some thought, via sms.

*******

I received and then sent my first text message, or sms, short for “short message service,” in the spring of 2000, when a Roman friend of mine was explaining how we could keep in touch without spending the exorbitant sums calling each other by mobile phone required. It seemed silly at first, but did save a good deal of time and money. I then suddenly awakened to the fact that a good portion of the people around me at any given moment were absorbed in writing messages on their mobiles: while ordering coffee at the bar, while walking down the street, while doing just about anything—their attention was elsewhere. This was a huge phenomenon in Europe because calling to and from mobiles was (and is) so expensive; in the US, the system is completely different, and text messaging made little sense. For several years, no one had heard of it, had the patience for it, or bothered with it—until the marketers stepped in with special “texting” packages, pointing out that it’s great for when you’re in loud clubs and can’t talk, or for not-so-directly letting people know you’re late to a rendezvous, or other supposed necessities. Hence everyone here started “texting” one another while absenting themselves from wherever they were as they frenetically typed away on their tiny mobile keypads.

So I decided the non-site of a text message—and peoples’ very state while writing, receiving, or replying to a text message—would be the site of my project. It was an ideally ambivalent subject for me: sms had allowed me to keep relationships alive across oceans and time zones for years on end, yet the brevity and constraints of such limited communication also bothered me. It fed one of my passions in the form of record keeping (I have almost every sms I’ve ever sent or received, creating a curiously concise portrayal of people, events, and experiences), but was also yet another electronic device I felt divorced me from my surroundings. So I ended up doing the most banal thing thinkable—I sent three brief messages:

1. (7:00 a.m. EST) WHERE ARE YOU?
2. (10:00 a.m. EST) WHERE ARE YOU NOW?
3. (1:00 p.m. EST) & NOW?

These were sent, over six hours’ time, to everyone in the seminar who’d given me their number. The idea was simply to get the receiver to be aware of their location at that given time. People were free to reply, or not reply, in any way they preferred. I chose all caps as a nod to telegrams as ancestors of both sms and e-mail and other brief, relatively immediate, ephemeral means of communication. The last message was sent during the final seminar, so it worked both as a last question and as a theatrical “and now what?” sort of lead-in to the discussion of this piece.

Peoples’ reactions were fascinating. Since newer e-mail conventions are fresher in most peoples' minds than telegram conventions, some interpreted the ALL CAPS as YELLING. Because of how it was written, I knew many people would think the first note was someone summoning them to a meeting they’d forgotten. I also knew most people would still be asleep. A Japanese participant was clearly awake and telephoned me straightaway, but I didn’t answer, as I wanted any and all communication to be text-based, leaving a record. Several people had forgotten giving me their numbers, and asked who I was. Many replied “home.” One replied not with a place, but with a verb: “sleeping.” But he clearly wasn’t, since he was sending me a text message. One girl was awakened by the message while soundly asleep with her boyfriend and, not recognizing the number, was struck by panic after concluding it could only be some ex of hers trying to get back in touch. The seminar “professor” interpreted it as a sort of surveillance, felt it was prying into his life, didn’t reply to any of them, and was reminded of a past project that predated mobiles wherein the artist had someone bring a phone to him periodically throughout the night and said things like “I know what you’ve done,” “confess,” “everybody can see what you’re up to,” etc.—a curious connection that, given its acutely accusatory mode, had little to do with the piece at hand.

I initially thought of it as a mere nudge for the recipients to meditate on where they were at that moment. I was also fond of the idea that we were all linked at three moments, over space and time, by a little nothing of a note, a few characters appearing on a little screen, which had the potential to open up a dialogue. Several of these conversations of sorts continued throughout the day, both by sms and then in the seminar itself. It was my first non-existent project, and the first time I was able to connect with some specific people, in specific sites, on a specific level.

*******

This holiday brings the project, abstract and abstruse as it may seem, back to mind. Gadgets, toys, PCs, and countless other things have the potential to both bring family and friends closer or further divide them—it’s how we choose to use such devices, and ultimately how aware we choose to be, that decides their role. While we might be geographically farther from those closest to us for these holidays, seemingly cold constructions like the internet and mobile networks and text messages, while they cannot embody a person or an embrace, can convey our thoughts and draw us closer.

On that note, it’s time for me to leave the screen and return to familial festivities. May you enjoy wherever you are right now, whomever you’re with, whatever you’re doing, however you choose.

Thanks for reading; previous Lunar Refractions can be found here.

monday musing: schwärmerei

It's already been a few years since the journal n+1 published its first issue. It included a section called The Intellectual Situation. There was something bold, intellectually exciting about a group of young thinkers uttering proclamations about "the intellectual situation." It would have seemed to many that the one thing about the intellectual situation today is that there is no intellectual situation. Maybe we could have been persuaded that there are any number of intellectual situations. Maybe these intellectual situations, in their staggering and sometimes upsetting diversity, are connected with one another in a roughly coherent, if bloated, constellation of thoughts and ideas. But such hazy notions tend to melt away in the face of reality, the pudding; sticky and opaque, like all pudding. So even to say it, "The Intellectual Situation," seemed worthy of our attention.

In one early entry, The Intellectual Situation (Part Two), the n+1ers decided to take on the McSweeney's empire, the publishing movement started and loosely run by Dave Eggers and having as one of its offshoots The Believer magazine. The piece has lingered in my mind for some time now, partly because I've never been sure exactly where I stand on it. But it has nagged me, vexed me. Finally something about it has jelled in my mind, not quite pudding exactly, but a sense of why the debate is so intriguing.

The gist of The Intellectual Situation (Part Two) was that the name of the magazine, The Believer, told you all you needed to know about its content. Believers, so the thinking goes, have abdicated on the intellect altogether and advocate in its place a basic acceptance, if not outright enthusiasm for the immediate conditions in which they find themselves. N+1 opined, "The Believer: now here’s a figure who would have revolted intellectuals of the 1930s, 1950s, 1970s. (The echo in intellectual history is Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer.) Mere belief is hostile to the whole idea of thinking. To wear credulity as one’s badge of intellect is not to be a thinker as such."

What's fascinating about this claim is how much it sounds like the debates about reason and its limits that erupted at the end of the 18th century as the Enlightenment met a host of its most cogent critics and as Kant's three Critiques threw the world into a huge tizzy about just what we're able to think about and what we're not. In short, Kant attempted to save Reason by limiting it. This created enemies on two sides; those who didn't want to be limited (bless their hearts), and those who found the saving effort to be too little too late (the wild boys, Romantics).

Now, you cannot simply paste the terms of the Enlightenment debate directly onto the current imbroglio between n+1 and The Believer. For one thing, most of the people on all sides of the debate in the late 18th and early 19th centuries wanted to save religion and they thought the other side was botching the job. The question doesn't resonate that way today. But one of the things that the defenders of the Enlightenment liked to do was to accuse their critics of some form of Schwärmerei. The word Schwärmerei comes from the verb schwärmen and sounds just like the English word it is related to, swarm. Schwärmerei is thus literally something like swarmfulness and it came to mean, essentially, enthusiasm, with a further implication that such enthusiasm is excessive or even fanatical. When Enlightenment critics accused their opponents of falling into Schwärmerei, they were accusing them of an irrational belief, mere belief, potentially dangerous belief. In many cases they had a point. Jacobi, for instance, could be a brilliant critic of the universal claims made by Kant. But he advocated in its place a leap into faith that was outright irrationality and mysticism. Hamann and Herder were the first thinkers to show how massively Kant had neglected to look into the particularities of language and culture, which seem to be at the very root of the possibility for having knowledge. But Hamann was close to insane and proclaimed "Nothing seems easier than the leap from one extreme to the other." Herder was more interested in being understood but his critique of reason led him to a defense of extreme nationalism as the only place where he could ground tradition and meaning. Schwärmerei has not only a dumb side, but a scary side.

*

The final paragraph of n+1's critique of The Believer reads, "Ultimately, the Believer is a book review. It has attracted writers we admire. It does differ in at least one particular from, say, the New York Review of Books, in that its overt criterion for inclusion is not expertise, but enthusiasm." Schwärmerei. Of course, there is a dig at the New York Review of Books here and the implication that enthusiasm may be a step up from mere expertise. N+1 has been consistently interested in staking the claim that things do matter and that we ought to write about the world and think about the world as if it really does matter. So they want a little bit of Schwärmerei, but just a little bit. They don't want to be overwhelmed by it, they don't want their critical faculties to drown in a sea of swarming enthusiasm.

They want to perform a balancing act. They recognize that there is something to talk about, that we can't simply stumble forward with the old criterion, the old defense of civilization. At the same time, they want to preserve the idea of critique that is our heirloom from the twentieth century. Here's a couple of lines from The Intellectual Situation (Part One): "It didn’t have to be this way: if only they [The New Republic] had allowed more positive individuality, cultivated something new, and still kept an old dignified adherence to the Great Tradition, running continuously to them (as they hoped) from the New York Intellectuals, whose ashes were in urns in the TNR vaults if they were anywhere." N+1 isn't looking backward, it's glancing backward with an eye toward what's ahead.

This is a worthy stance. It is Kantian, not so much in the particularities of the argument but in the structure of the argument. It's a new defense of the critical tradition that is willing to shake things up a little, that gives the nod to Edmund Wilson without bowing down slavishly before him. Just as Kant realized that to defend anything in the spirit of the Enlightenment he was going to have to acknowledge some major flaws, n+1 has taken on a similar two front war: Attack the dead rot within the critical tradition in order finally to renew it. This is exciting. It's exciting.

It's also completely wrong. But I say that with admiration. I'm from the sneaky school of Romantic Ironists for whom being wrong is just another admirable way of being human. Kant was the most powerful philosophic mind since Aristotle. But he couldn't save the Enlightenment, he couldn't save reason the way he wanted to and it turns out, I'm sorry to say, that synthetic a priori judgments are not possible. Similarly, n+1 is not going to save the critical tradition. That's not because the critical tradition was more limited or more wrong than anything else (everything is limited and wrong) but because it was of a time and that time is over, never to return. The basic assumptions that the critical tradition assumed are no longer assumable. N+1 tries to reassume them, if in a reinvigorated guise. It is difficult, however, to reinvigorate a corpse.

*

One of the more successful among a host of interesting and ambitious side projects for n+1 has been their pamphlet series. The second one (What We Should Have Known), in particular, captures the spirit of honest inquiry with a commitment to serious literature and thought that is the very best side of n+1. It is a discussion about our collective past, the days of youth, college. It is a look back to what we wish we had been reading and thinking about given what we know now. It's a delight to read.

But there's also a troubling undercurrent to the discussion that is never addressed as such. It's the implication that something has gone astray, that we were thinking about the wrong things when we could have been thinking about the right ones. This is always true, of course, and therefore simultaneously not true at all. It is perfectly fine to play with this feeling of intellectual regret, to roll it round on the tongue. But it is something different to actually propose it as an ethic. There's the assumption in the n+1 discussion sometimes that we had everything we needed out there and that somehow we failed to recognize it. Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment comes up a number of times. I did my PhD in philosophy at The New School. The Dialectic of Enlightenment is in my bones. But I know in those same bones that The Dialectic of Enlightenment is not the book that's going to put us back on the right track to critical thinking again, even with its intellectual nod to the Romantic tradition. It is a dusty book right now, a book for our grandchildren to rediscover, a book that needs to sit around in the basement until history cycles itself through once or twice. Hearkening to books of the immediate past in that way is the refuge of reactionaries, be they from the left or the right, and n+1 is better than that. The Dialectic of Enlightenment is critique of the Enlightenment minus even a dollop of Schwärmerei and as even n+1 is willing to admit, it's going to be difficult to move forward without that dollop.

The debate, then, should rather be about how much Schwärmerei and where to apply it. In a lovely piece by Jacques Barzun written in 1940 and currently republished on the American Scholar website (in a tribute to Barzun's 100th birthday) he writes, in defending Romanticism that, "Romanticism was full of disbelievers in every kind of creed, but it numbered hardly a single unbeliever." It is this believing as a basic stance toward the world, this specific form of Schwärmerei, that allows the Romantic to enter into the world again with fresh eyes. As Barzun explains, "Perceiving all forms and conventions to be relative, the romanticist is an individualist, a democrat and a cosmopolitan. Having had the mutability of human affairs brought home to him and being endowed with the spirit of adventure, he values the variety of human experience." This stance is antithetical to the distance roundly recommended as necessary by the critical tradition. If you were to put it purely in spatial terms you'd say that Romantics always want to run up close to things while the proponents of 'The Great Tradition' always want to take another step back. I leave it to you, dear reader, to decide which standpoint is more apt to the moment. I propose to my friends at n+1 that we believers, just as two centuries ago, won't be so easily brushed aside in our Schwärmerei. Let the games begin.

On Acteal and on the Oblivion

Rodolfo Hernández

More than a decade ago, my academic mentor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, Graciela Uribe, a Chilean political geographer exiled in Mexico as a result of the dictatorship of Pinochet, urged me to write my Bachelor’s thesis about the uprising of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN), an indigenous group in the Mexican state of Chiapas. On January 1, 1994, the Zapatistas including the now world famous Sub-Commandante Marcos on January 1, 1994 declared war on the Mexican state to obtain eleven basic rights, among them education, housing, health care, liberty, peace and democracy. I never finished the thesis on the indigenous rebellion; rather I wrote a completely different piece. Even on the day I defended my thesis Graciela insisted me that a work about the Zapatistas should still be written.

In Mexico, racism shapes every day social life, and is one of the principal sources of political and economic injustice. Mexican people often not only normalize and accept racism, but sometimes they also justify it, defend it, or simply forget about it. The latter is especially true when racism and oppression are directed against indigenous peoples. Why do Mexicans accept this? About six decades ago, the Uruguayan writer Mario Benedetti wrote his celebrated poem Un padre nuestro latinoamericano (A Latin American Lord’s Prayer): “No nos dejes caer en la tentación/ de olvidar o vender este pasado/ o arrendar una sola hectárea de su olvido/ ahora que es la hora de saber quiénes somos” or “Lord do not leave us to fall into the temptation/ of forgetting or selling our past/ or even to lease a single hectare of its oblivion/ now that is the moment to know who we are.” (my translation)

When Benedetti wrote his poem, Latin America was moving between the nightmares of the state violence and the attempts toward the end of the fifties to create peoples’ utopias. Sadly, more nightmares were still waiting hidden along the twisted path of the Latin America history. And with them, more attempts were made to plant the enchanting temptations of living with oblivion ⎯ our individual and collective oblivion.

On the morning of December 22 of 1997, in the community of Acteal, a town located in Chiapas, 325 indigenous members of Las Abejas (The Bees), a pacifist group founded in 1992, were attacked by approximately 60 paramilitaries linked to the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), the party that ruled Mexico for more than seven decades. 15 children, 21 women and nine men were killed in the massacre. None of them was armed, and many couldn’t even see their assassins as they were shot from behind while praying and resting on their knees.

The massacre of Acteal was the outcome of the “Low Intensity Warfare” (LIW) strategy launched by the Mexican state. Actually LIW is of United States’ origin. Confronted with revolutionary insurgency throughout Latin and Central America, as well as in Southeast Asia, the American military had supported low-intensity tactics such as torture, assassination, and terrorizing civilian populations through the deployment of paramilitary groups as steps useful to the survival of its client states. The low intensity warfare strategy begun in the Chiapas state during 1995 consisted of the financing, training and arming of paramilitaries. As historian and anthropologist, Andrés Aubry (1997) pointed out that even before the massacre in Acteal, indigenous communities of Chiapas suffered sustained attacks by paramilitaries recruited by the Mexican government that included Chiapas young people who had no access to land and were socially detached from their communities. In 1998, Mexican journalist Carlos Marin documented the role of the Mexican Army in the development of groups such as Paz y Justicia, Los Chinchulines, and Mascara Roja.

Along with the paramilitary strategy, the Mexican government attempted to stir up internal conflicts and hostility among indigenous peoples in their communities, actions that led to the displacement of more than ten thousand people. Most of the displaced were Zapatista supporters, and their flight from the low intensity warfare zones created one of the worst humanitarian crises in Mexico’s recent history. People experienced the destruction of their houses and the confiscation of their agricultural lands. The peasant plots were used by paramilitaries to produce illegal drugs.

Today as in 1997, historians such as Aguilar Camín (1998, 2007) insist that the Acteal massacre was ignited by communal and family disputes, and religious intolerance. Their dismissal of massacre claims covers over the degree to which the state sponsored violence against Acteal’s people, the vast majority of whom were treated not as Zapatista sympathizers but as domestic enemies. The Interamerican Court of Human Rights is currently hearing arguments about whether the low intensity warfare prosecuted against the peoples of Chiapas constitutes a crime against humanity, and whether then President Ernesto Zedillo approved and directed the war efforts that included the Acteal massacre.

I was 25 years old when the massacre of Acteal occurred, and I never wrote my thesis on the Zapatista movement as my mentor so urgently recommended. Instead, my wife wrote her thesis on Chiapas, from which I have benefited greatly. But I have come to believe, as did my professor, that the fight for justice in Chiapas is part of the Latin American struggle against the oblivion and the silence still imposed by many states in Central and Latin America (including Mexico).

The urgency of events represented by the Acteal massacre 10 years ago has not abated. I hope that this column, in large part first inspired by my Professor Graciela Uribe, is a testimony to her belief, and those of other Latin America progressives, that our continent from the Rio Grande to Patagonia is deserving of our enduring love and attention. Given the long history of state oppression throughout Latin America punctuated by a persistent racism toward indigenous peoples, it is sometimes hard to sustain the struggle for justice by everyone who cares, including me. As Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo wrote: “Hoy me gusta la vida mucho menos, pero siempre me gusta vivir,” or “today I like life less, but I do always like to live.”

Perhaps by sustaining the common struggle, oblivion can be avoided.

I hope readers will feel free to ask for references on the subjects raised in the column. In the meantime, best wishes for the holidays!

Perceptions: of last summer

Sughra Raza. Safe Within My Car. July 2006.

Digital photograph.

Democracy and The New Atheism

Tina Beattie in openDemocracy:

The 19th-century confrontation between religion and science was largely fuelled by a power-struggle between men of science and men of God, most of them members of the Victorian ruling classes. Whereas the clergy and the Church of England had previously ruled the roost of English public life, in the mid-19th century the dynamics of power shifted, and scientists began to wrest much of the authority from their clerical counterparts in shaping intellectual enquiry and values. But just as this "war" masked a much more amicable and creative dialogue between scientists and theologians in a society which was still largely Christian in its beliefs, so today the attempt to portray the relationship between science and religion as one of irreconcilable conflict is a distortion of a more pluralist intellectual and religious environment.

Many scientists see no fundamental conflict between science and faith, and some argue that quantum physics challenges any attempt to maintain a strict distinction between scientific and philosophical or theological knowledge. Some scientists - such as the head of the human-genome project, Francis S Collins - have converted from atheism to Christianity as a result of their scientific research. Many members of the scientific community have sought to distance themselves from the self-publicising polemics of Richard Dawkins and his fellow "new atheists", for they see the fact that Dawkins in particular has become so dogmatic and ideologically driven in his militant atheism as a betrayal of the very scientific values which he claims to represent.

The attempt to stage a war between religion and science - whether fuelled by religious or scientific fundamentalists - is part of the problem and not part of the solution with regard to the times we are living in. If we seek to preserve our liberal western values, then we need to resist the spirit of aggression and confrontation which is becoming increasingly characteristic of public debate - in Britain and the United States especially - concerning the role of religion in society.

Tehran's Underground Rock Scene

Colin Myen in In These Times:

At a 2001 rock concert in Tehran, Iran, members of the alternative rock band O-hum wore jeans and T-shirts. Some of them had mop tops. The lead singer jumped around with his bright red guitar as young girls screamed and boys climbed onto the stage before jumping off and body surfing the crowd.

Hundreds of young Iranians packed the Russian Orthodox Church (a neutral site not under government control) to hear O-hum’s Persian Rock—a blend of Western and Iranian music that lead singer Shahram Sharbaf and guitarist Shahrokh Izadkhah co-created. Juxtaposing the lyrics of Hafez, a 17th-century Persian poet, with soft Middle Eastern string instruments, drum beats and electric guitar riffs, O-hum’s music was hard and distinctly rock and roll.

O-hum, which means “illusions” in Farsi, was at the forefront of the Iranian underground music scene, building a voice of dissent and a refuge from the rigid censorship of the cleric-run government. The 2001 concert was O-hum’s first in Iran—and one of its last.

Holiday Poem: Brodsky's "December 24, 1971"

On this day before Christmas Eve:

by Joseph Brodksy, translated by Alan Myers

When it's Christmas we're all of us magi.
At the grocers' all slipping and pushing.
Where a tin of halva, coffee-flavored,
is the cause of a human assault-wave
by a crowd heavy-laden with parcels:
each one his own king, his own camel.

Nylon bags, carrier bags, cones of paper,
caps and neckties all twisted up sideways.
Reek of vodka and resin and cod
orange mandarins, cinnamon, apples.
Floods of faces, no sign of a pathway
toward Bethlehem, shut off by snow.

And the bearers of gifts, unassuming,
leap on buses and jam all the doorways,
disappear into courtyards that gape,
though they know that there's nothing inside there:
not a beast, not a crib, nor yet Her,
round whose head gleams a nimbus of gold.

Emptiness. But the mere thought of that
brings forth lights as if out of nowhere.
Had Herod but known the stronger he seemed,
the more sure, the more certain the wonder.
Every year this constant relation
is the basic machinery of Christmas.

This they celebrate now everywhere,
for its coming push tables together.
No demand for a star yet awhile,
but a sort of goodwill touched with grace
can be seen in all men from afar,
and the shepherds have kindled their fires.

Snow is falling: not smoking but sounding
chimney pots on the roof, every face like a stain.
Herod drinks. Every wife hides her child.
He who comes is a mystery to no one:
but the signs are confusing, men's hearts may
find it hard to acknowledge the stranger.

But the draft through the doorway will part
the thick mist of the hours of darkness
and a shape in a shawl stand revealed,
and the Christ-child and Spirit that's Holy
will be sensed in the soul without shame;
a glance skyward will show it—the star.

Deadpan Soviet Style

Via Amitava Kumar, George Saunders in the NYT:

Let us consider Daniil Kharms, the Russian writer often described as an absurdist, largely unpublished in his lifetime except for his children’s books, who starved to death in the psychiatric ward of a Soviet hospital during the siege of Leningrad, having been put there by the Stalinist government for, among other reasons, his general strangeness. Kharms gave flamboyant poetry readings from the top of an armoire, did performance art on the Nevsky Prospect — by, for example, lying down on it, sometimes dressed as Sherlock Holmes — and was a founder of the Union of Real Art, an avant-garde group also known as Oberiu. His brilliant, hilarious, violent little stories, written “for the drawer,” are now being discovered in the West through translations by Neil Cornwell (collected in “Incidences”) and by Matvei Yankelevich, whose anthology “Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms” (Overlook, $29.95) has just been published.

Kharms’s stories are truly odd, as in: at first you think they’re defective. They seem to cower at the suggestion of rising action, to blush at the heightened causality that makes a story a story. They sometimes end, you feel, before they’ve even begun.

The Limits of Explanation

Over at YouTube, a Philoctetes Center discussion with with Edward Casey, Francisca Cho, Harry Eyres, Robert Michels, Mark Norell, and Christopher Peacocke.

mundane cosmopolitanisation

The nationalist perspective - which equates society with the society of the nation state - blinds us to the world in which we live. In order to perceive the interrelatedness of people and of populations around the globe in the first place, we need a cosmopolitan perspective. The common terminological denominator of our densely populated world is "cosmopolitanisation", which means the erosion of distinct boundaries dividing markets, states, civilizations, cultures, and not least of all the lifeworlds of different peoples. The world has not certainly not become borderless, but the boundaries are becoming blurred and indistinct, becoming permeable to flows of information and capital. Less so, on the other hand, to flows of people: tourists yes, migrants no. Taking place in national and local lifeworlds and institutions is a process of internal globalisation. This alters the conditions for the construction of social identity, which need no longer be impressed by the negative juxtaposition of "us" and "them".

For me, it is important that cosmopolitanisation does not occur somewhere in abstraction or on a global scale, somewhere above people's heads, but that it takes place in the everyday lives of individuals ("mundane cosmopolitanisation").

more from Sign and Sight here.

the Terracotta Army

There are few enough points of continuity between the official state ideology of Maoist China and the ideology espoused by the country’s leaders today. But the significance of Qin Shi Huangdi, First August and Divine Emperor and subject of the outstandingly popular BM exhibition, The First Emperor: China’s Terracotta Army, might be one of them.* In the mid-1970s he had a starring role in one of the more bizarre movements of the Great Helmsman’s fading years. This was the so-called Struggle between Confucianism and Legalism, an attempt to recast the whole of Chinese history into a Manichaean conflict between two ‘lines’. You had the Confucian bad guys (humanist, conservative, capitalist) and the Legalist good guys (harsh authoritarian proto-socialists, with History on their side). ‘Burying the Confucians and burning the books’ – for which the First Emperor had been excoriated by centuries of historians – was now reconfigured as the forward-thinking decisiveness necessary to crush backsliding and ensure the victory of the correct line. The modern, slightly (but not much) subtler version of this appears in Zhang Yimou’s 2002 film portrayal, Hero. There, the emperor voices in impeccable classical Chinese the sentiment that you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, or, to put it differently: the deaths of many are a necessary part of China’s rise to Unity and Greatness. The ‘resistance is futile’ film clips of the all-conquering armies of Qin, projected onto the walls of the Reading Room, look as if they use some of the costumes from the movie. Underneath the visitor’s feet are the old library desks, one of which was arbitrarily decided by curators to be ‘Marx’s seat’, in order to satisfy the curiosity of pious delegations from the East; not so very long ago, either.

more from the LRB here.

walzer's liberalism

"I don't think that I ever managed real philosophy," Michael Walzer says in the interview that forms the last chapter of "Thinking Politically" (Yale University Press, 333 pages, $30), the stimulating new collection of his essays. This may sound like false modesty coming from Mr. Walzer, who is one of America's leading political philosophers. But in fact, by forswearing the name of philosopher, he is merely trying to give a more precise definition of the kind of thinking he does. "I couldn't breathe easily at the high level of abstraction that philosophy seemed to require," he explains. "I quickly got impatient with the playful extension of hypothetical cases, moving farther and farther away from the world we all lived in." Mr. Walzer's essays take exactly the opposite approach: They set up camp in the midst of the world we all live in bringing the rigor of political theory to the messiness of political debate. It makes sense that Mr. Walzer is both a professor at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study and an editor of Dissent, the left-liberal journal: His theories are always also interventions.

more from the NY Sun here.

Bella Abzug: An Oral History

From The Boston Globe:

No one, it seems, ever had a tepid reaction to Bella Abzug.

Amy Swerdlow, who worked with her, said, "I learned a lot from Bella. I don't think Bella would ever think she ever learned anything from anybody." Edward Kennedy, one of her admirers, said, "She stirred the House in such a way to push her view, irritate, antagonize, cajole, persuade, inspire, and lead." Geraldine Ferraro, on Bella as a role model for women, said, "She didn't knock lightly on the door. She didn't even push it open or batter it down. She took it off the hinges forever! So that those of us who came after could walk through."

The portrait that emerges from the many voices gathered here is of a fearless, brilliant, dynamic, charismatic, assertive, abrasive, impatient woman. While she annoyed many people, she also inspired many and advanced the causes she believed in: world peace, Zionism, social justice, equality for women, environmental awareness, and economic equality.

More here.

Perchance to Dream

Dennis Drabelle in The Wsahington Post:

Author Jeff Warren is summarizing a psychological study in which "one group practiced tensing and relaxing a finger in their left hands, and another group just imagined doing the same thing." When it was all over, the finger strength of the physical tensers had increased by an average of 30 percent, but that of the mental tensers had gone up nearly as much, to 22 percent.

But if you look beyond the book's flower-child title, as well as its numerous drawings and diagrams, you find yourself being instructed by a serious journalist with both feet on the ground -- except when he's in bed and taking part in experiments. In The Head Trip, Warren pursues his conviction that "consciousness exists in more widely varied and abundant forms than simple waking, sleeping, and dreaming" by talking with experts and submitting to protocols.

Salvador Dali used to trawl his brain for bizarre images to go into his surrealist paintings by sitting in a chair after a meal with his hands extended beyond the chair-arms and a key held between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand. When he nodded off, the key would fall to the floor, make a clink, and wake him up so that he could go sketch the melting watch he'd just glimpsed on his inner canvas.

More here.

Santa™

Jason Wilson in The Smart Set:

I write a column about booze every other week for a major newspaper, and I often travel outside of the country, sometimes simply to drink some type of alcoholic beverage that I will eventually write about in my column. I also happen to be a father of two young boys. It therefore may not come as a total shock to learn that I am regularly seized by the terrifying notion that I am the worst, most horrible parent in the world. These moments usually strike when, say, I am sampling a vintage port on a lovely Portuguese afternoon or tasting a Dutch gin a stone’s throw from Amsterdam’s Red Light District, and then suddenly realize that back home in New Jersey it’s early morning and my wife is likely getting the kids ready for school.

Perhaps this is the reason that I recently took my oldest son, 5-year-old Sander, along with me on a business trip to Finnish Lapland so he could meet the “real” Santa Claus. So many acquaintances have asked me what on Earth possessed me to take a 5-year-old to the Arctic Circle in the middle of December — I’m still not exactly sure myself, but I’m guessing parental guilt played as big a role as any.

Even the elves at Santa’s Office, in Santa Claus’ Village, in Rovaniemi, Finland seemed incredulous that we should come from so far away to stand in line for something we could have experienced at the local mall. “You’re from USA?” asked the “elf” who logged our reservation to meet Santa, the one wearing a pointy hat and nametag that read “Lara,” who arched her eyebrow with the sort of disdain that only a local teen can convey to a visiting tourist. “What brings you all the way to Rovaniemi? That is a very long way to come just to see Santa Claus.”

More here, including a very nice slide show.

r. kelly: "Barbarella" meets "Land of the Lost."

If R. Kelly was at all worried about his recent legal woes, he sure didn't show it during his performance at a crowded United Center on Friday.

The Chicago-born R&B singer/writer/producer, who is finally set to stand trial in 2008 in connection with a 2002 indictment on 14 counts of child pornography, missed a courtroom appearance the week leading up to the concert and nearly had his bond revoked.

Still, the steady stream of controversy has done little to slow Kelly's momentum. His latest album, "Double Up," debuted atop the Billboard charts and has already gone platinum. But that's not to say that the singer can't feel the wolves circling. On a stage decked out like a boxing ring, Kelly made his way through the crowd like a prizefighter before lashing out at his detractors on "The Champ." "Spread rumors/Point fingers/Throw stones," he sang. "Hate me/Love me/Hug me/Curse me."

more from The Chicago Tribune here.

the a.q. khan story

Khan's story is a three-decade-long cloak-and-dagger saga, one that jumps from Washington, Amsterdam and Johannesburg to Islamabad, Tehran and Timbuktu and drags in corrupt Pakstani generals, unscrupulous European businessmen and dissembling American diplomats. It's no surprise that there has been a cascade of books on Khan in recent years. But the three newest -- "The Nuclear Jihadist" by Douglas Frantz (a former L.A. Times managing editor) and Catherine Collins, "Deception" by Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark and "America and the Islamic Bomb" by David Armstrong and Joseph Trento -- drive home the point that Khan is not the real story here. More important is how and why he was able to flout the nuclear nonproliferation regime for so many years, "ushering in," as Frantz and Collins put it, "the second nuclear age." Jonathan Schell, in his new book "The Seventh Decade," calls this the era of "nuclear anarchy."

more from the LA Times here.

philosophers gone wild

It is probably the most negative book review ever written. Or if there is a worse one, do let me know. "This book runs the full gamut from the mediocre to the ludicrous to the merely bad," begins Colin McGinn's review of On Consciousness by Ted Honderich. "It is painful to read, poorly thought out, and uninformed. It is also radically inconsistent."

The ending isn't much better: "Is there anything of merit in On Consciousness? Honderich does occasionally show glimmers of understanding that the problem of consciousness is difficult and that most of our ideas about it fall short of the mark. His instincts, at least, are not always wrong. It is a pity that his own efforts here are so shoddy, inept, and disastrous (to use a term he is fond of applying to the views of others)."

And in the middle, there is nothing to cheer the book's author. Honderich's book is, according to McGinn, sly, woefully uninformed, preposterous, easily refuted, unsophisticated, uncomprehending, banal, pointless, excruciating.

more from The Guardian here.

2007 Pop Music Abstract

From The Tris McCall Report:

Snoop Dogg -- "Sensual Seduction"

Ignore the title, that's just the radio-approved handle; real fans and bootleggers know it as "Sexual Explosion". This is Snoop's long-awaited tribute to Zapp, which means he's run his entire vocal through a talkbox. Poppin', to be sure, but nine out of ten casual listeners will miss the reference and mistake this for yet another digitized T-Pain performance. (Is that the secret to the popularity of the pitch-corrected sound, I wonder?; that it reminds us of Zapp, the Mothership, and the funky vocoder?) Arguably, "More Bounce To The Ounce" and "Computer Love" were the two primary sources for the g-funk sound, and as Nasir the Fussy Archivist pointed out on Hip-Hop Is Dead, Roger Troutman's name is barely remembered these days. Snoop does his best to resurrect it here, and in the process, he's given the Westside something new to low-ride to. It's a neat novelty, but to be honest, when he breaks convention midway through the track and begins to rap, it feels like a happy homecoming.

More here.  [Thanks to Asad Raza.]

Slow architecture that tastes good

From The Times:

 

China, Dubai, Moscow or Kazakhstan apart, there’s a shift among many young architects away from flash, if lucrative, bling buildings and towards, what? The uniconic? The spiritual leader of this not-quite-movement, Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, calls it slow architecture. Like slow food, this is about local produce that tastes good. It’s about that hard-to-define idea, integrity. Architecturally, it means back to basics building: providing beautiful shelter, addressing human needs with architecture which has longevity and presence, undeniably modern but also showing the mark of human hand. Its response to the bombast, fakery and crash-bang-wallop of globalisation is radical in its reactionariness.

In this year’s runners and riders in the AR Awards, for instance, you’ll find not skyscrapers and bling, but a beigel-shaped kindergarten in Tokyo with a huge rooftop playground, Madrid’s beautiful memorial to 2004’s Al Qaida bombings, a low-cost school for South Africa. This is tactile architecture, architecture that speaks of its social, environmental and spiritual obligations.

More here. (For Jaffer).

A Beast in the Jungle

David Leavitt in The New York Times:

“Henry James: The Mature Master” by Sheldon M. Novick strives to supplant the common view of James as “a passive, fearful man, a detached observer of the life around him” with one of the writer as a gregarious, sometimes heroic, often troubled citizen of the world. Far from a sniffy celibate living comfortably on independent means or a “little boy with his nose pressed against the glass of a shop window,” Novick’s James was an authentic cosmopolite who led a life as emotionally, sexually and financially complex as those of the characters in his fiction.

Does Novick succeed in giving us a new, more “ordinary,” less cerebral Henry James? The answer, for better or worse, is yes. Indeed, the life that he describes (“The Mature Master” begins with the successful 1881 publication of “The Portrait of a Lady” and ends with James’s death in 1916) is one that, for any urban writer, will seem eerily, even tiresomely familiar. Passionately devoted to his craft, James is also burdened by the constant pressure to make money. He suffers from back pain and constipation, and often feels overwhelmed by the amount of writing he has to do: in addition to the novels, many of them published in serial form, there are the short stories, travel articles, reviews and “potboilers” from which he earns his living, not to mention the correspondence with which he feels dutybound to keep up.

More here.

Saturday Qawwali Special III

"Merey Baney Ki Baat Na Poochho" by Farid Ayaz and Abu Muhammad Qawwal:

"Tajdar-e-Haram, Part 1" by Ghulam Fareed Sabri and Maqbool Ahmad Sabri (Sabri Brothers):

"Tajdar-e-Haram, Part 2" by Ghulam Fareed Sabri and Maqbool Ahmad Sabri (Sabri Brothers):

"Piya Ghar Aya" by Farid Ayaz and Abu Muhammad Qawwal:

See also Saturday Qawwali Special I and Saturday Qawwali Special II.