turning to ganesh

Francine Prose at the Virginia Quarterly Review:

It’s been almost forty years since I bought an image of Sri Ganesh, the elephant-​headed Hindu god, from a street vendor in the Chor Bazaar—​the Thieves’ Market—​in Mumbai, which at that time was still Bombay. I’ve had the picture, surrounded by a simple black frame and protected by a durable pane of glass, on my writing desk ever since. 

 When I say desk, I mean desks. I carried the Ganesh with me through the moves and dislocations of my peripatetic late twenties. And later, when I traveled with my husband and two sons to take a succession of visiting-​writer jobs at various colleges and universities, Ganesh’s portrait was among the first things I packed to bring along, the first things I unpacked when I came home. One way to know what you value is to see what you can’t stand to leave behind.

Of course, there’s no “scientific” evidence to prove that I would stop writing completely and forever if I tried to work without the calming, steady gaze of the half-​human, half-​elephant deity presiding over my efforts. But I’m by nature a believer in many garden-​variety superstitions (no open umbrellas indoors, please!) as well as some that are purely of my own invention. I’ve always had a sense about the Ganesh, a feeling that I’ve never been able to shake and never wanted to put to the test.

more here.

letter from cairo

Wiam El-Tamami at Granta:

Cairo moved on, as it does, settling into July. I went to stay with my sister. Between my travels and her own and various distances of other kinds, we hadn’t spent much time together in years. As hard as it was to be, it was better to be there, staying up all night, drifting around each other in the rooms; to not have to speak or say or come out of ourselves, to know there is no explanation for now. To just be there, quiet and with her, the wanass of her – a wisp of a word meaning something like this, the consolation of company.

I can’t tell you much about that haze of days, where each one went before sliding thickly into the next. Hours were spent staring into computer screens, eyes like bowls. I suppose we slept, but sleep was something cobbled together from stray hours, after dawn or afternoon, and it didn’t much resemble rest. Things seeped into our dreams.

My sister continued to work; hers was a direct battle against the ugliness. I moved untethered around the house, not knowing what to do with myself, trying to write, to wrangle out some words at a time when I wished above all for silence.

more here.

a new exhibit on post-war american art

Jed Perl at The New Republic:

A truly expansive account of postwar American art forces us to see everything in a new light. What has been described as a return to reality in the work of some artists in this show was in fact a continuation of concerns that preoccupied key figures among the Abstract Expressionists, including Hans Hofmann and Willem de Kooning; at the end of his life Hofmann spoke of once again painting from nature, and de Kooning upset many admirers of his abstract paintings of the late 1940s by switching to figure painting for a time in the early 1950s. A great show about this period would be extraordinarily moving, revealing a heterodox New York School that is hardly even whispered about, except in writings on websites like Painters’ Table, The Silo, and artcritical. The School of New York always delighted in reimagining reality after the experience of abstraction—and vice versa. The clearest expressions of this emboldened double vision included in “See It Loud” are Leland Bell’s daringly simplified, ecstatically colored canvases of two figures in a bedroom, which would be unimaginable without the geometries of Mondrian and Arp, abstract artists revered by many in New York in the 1940s and 1950s. (By the way, I suspect that the later—and greater—of the two Bell bedroom scenes in the show is misdated by as much as a decade. So much for scholarship.)

more here.

the relation between writing and translating

Margaret Jull Costa at the Times Literary Supplement:

The Cahiers Series is a collection of beautifully produced booklets (twenty-two have been published so far), around forty pages in length, all illustrated with images, which are sometimes apposite, sometimes not, but always interesting. The declared goal of the series is “to make available new explorations in writing, in translating, and in the areas linking these two activities”. Some editions have a fairly tenuous connection to translation: in Shades of the Other Shore, two Americans, a poet and an artist respectively, are “translated” from the United States to rural France, with Jeffrey Greene’s short prose pieces and poems exploring “imagined correspondences between personal and historical ghosts tied to the seasons”, and Ralph Petty’s watercolours recording a journey to the source of a local river; in Józef Czapski: A life in translation, the novelist and translator Keith Botsford writes an imaginary autobiography of the Polish author and critic; inIn the Thick of Things, the French architect Vincen Cornu attempts “to ‘translate’ architectural sensation into words and images”. Then there are the cahiers written by translators or by poets who also translate, as well as translations of stories or plays followed by a brief translator’s note.

more here.

In Delville Wood

Neal Acherson at the London Review of Books:

All cults, in the Bronze Age or today, change emphasis and practice over time. In the later monuments, the early language of ‘supreme sacrifice’ or ‘they died that we might live’ falls away. The delayed wave of war memoirs, poetry and fiction which appeared after about 1928 (Remarque, Sassoon, Edmund Blunden among many others) may have sobered the memorial designers. God also retreats several paces from the iconography, although the graves of the unidentified dead are still marked ‘Known to God’ and the families still write: ‘May God protect you: One of the Best.’

Change has also come to the huge South African shrine at Delville Wood, much of it completed in the apartheid years. There is a new flag, new tablets remembering the Africans who died in Pretoria’s service. More than three thousand white soldiers went into this wood in 1916, and a few days later just over six hundred were still alive and on their feet. The wood, smashed to black spikes, was replanted but its floor is still a crazy pattern of shell-holes.

A Jan Smuts quotation is set in bronze. ‘I do sincerely believe that we are struggling for the preservation, against terrible odds, of what is most precious in our civilisation.’ Few of the women bringing poppy crosses, or the young teachers trying to explain the Thiepval monument to their teenagers, would swallow that, or even understand it. All the same, opinion about the Great War hasn’t moved in a straight line.

more here.

A Conversation With: Jazz Pianist Vijay Iyer

Visi Talik in India Ink:

Q. When did you get into jazz?

A. I skipped grades to graduate high school at 16. At this time I started exploring jazz. I was listening to a lot of John Coltrane and others, and I was also listening to a lot of Indian classical music that I grew up with. I was composing my own music at this point, and getting ready for college as well.

Q. Where was college, and what happened there?

A. I got a B.S. in mathematics and physics from Yale College, and a masters in physics and an interdisciplinary Ph.D from the University of California in Berkeley. When I enrolled in the Ph.D program to study math and physics, I was already performing jazz piano. I was being presented in music festivals and invited to perform at prestigious clubs and concerts.

In 1995, I was coming out with my first solo album, I was a band leader putting together some great music, I decided to switch from a Ph.D in math and physics to one in the cognitive science of music from the University of California at Berkeley. I took the leap.

Q. In an essay, “New York Stories,” you wrote, “We don’t play “in a genre”; we play in the context of others, and we find ways to play with each other.” Can you describe how you have broken out of your “genre”?

A. It’s exactly that mentality. All the choices I make as an artist are inspired by the history of this music and this musical community that I’m a part of. And if you look at that history you see that it was always very smooth in terms of stylistic attributes and what was common was this collaborative orientation and a community orientation. It was something that contained a lot of experimentation and a lot of discipline, a lot of knowledge, and it sort of formed at the intersection of a lot of different extremes of knowledge.

People think of it as a genre but for the community of artists there’s really no such a thing. That’s sort of been my experience working with elders from that heritage and from that history. But it’s always been a space for collaboration and creation that is irrespective of marketplace notions of genre. 

More here.

Thursday Poem

To Marina Tsvetaeva

The cold 
of a lump of sugar
on the tongue of a cup of tea
of a loaf of bread that leaps
in bloody slices.
The dishwasher’s trade
the genuflections
and hands that are still
being submerged with certain good sense.
The reds
the whites
the skinheads
and Cossacks
might kick down my door
or there may appear a rope
for securing a trunk and hang me
without me shuddering a centimeter

Damaris Calderón
translation: Julie Flanagan
from Poetry International Web

A Marina Tsvetaeva

El frio
de un terrón de azúcar
en la lengua de una taza de té
de un pan que salta
en rebanadas sangrientas.
El oficio de lavaplatos,
las genuflexiones
y las manos que todavía
se sumergen con cierta cordura.
Los rojos
los blancos
los cabezas rapadas
y los cosacos
podrán echar mi puerta a patadas
o aparezca una cuerda
con que atar un baúl y colgarme
sin que me estremezca un centímetro.

by Damaris Calderón

Gandhi's master biographer uncovers an unlikely friendship with an English couple

Ramachandra Guha in The Independent:

Largely forgotten now are Gandhi's closest friends in South Africa, who were an English couple named Henry and Millie Polak. Henry was a radical Jew, Millie a Christian feminist. They had fallen in love in London, whereupon Henry's family sent him away to South Africa. He met Gandhi in a vegetarian restaurant in Johannesburg, and was immediately attracted to the Indian lawyer and his cause. Gandhi, on his part, took it upon himself to have Henry reunited with Millie. When Polak's father claimed that the girl was not robust enough for marriage, Gandhi wrote that if she was indeed fragile, "in South Africa, amidst loving care, a beautiful climate and a simple life, she could gain the physical strength she evidently needed".

The appeal was successful. Millie arrived in Johannesburg in the last week of December 1905. The next day, Henry and Millie went with Gandhi to be married by the Registrar of European Marriages. The Hindu hoped to bear witness to this union of Jew and Christian; the Registrar thought this was not permitted by law. He asked them to come back the next working day. But the next day was Sunday, and the day after that, New Year's Day. And Millie and Henry had waited long enough already. So Gandhi went across to the office of the Chief Magistrate, to whom the Registrar reported. He convinced him that nothing in the law debarred a brown man from witnessing a European marriage. The Magistrate, remembered Gandhi, merely "laughed and gave me a note to the Registrar and the marriage was duly registered". The deed done, the couple moved into the lawyer's home on Albermarle Street, where Gandhi lived with his wife, Kasturba, and their four sons. Millie began teaching the boys English grammar and composition, while helping Kasturba in the kitchen. The two women became friends, with the newcomer's buoyant nature overcoming the matriarch's natural reserve and her lack of familiarity with the English language.

More here.

Science’s rightful place is in service of society

Daniel Sarewitz in Nature:

Amid the mess of US politics — a pointless government shut-down, across-the-board cuts, endless partisan squabbling — now is a good moment to take stock of the fate of publicly funded science. After all, five years ago next week Barack Obama was first elected president, promising that he would “restore science to its rightful place” in US society. How has he done? Pretty well — and the ongoing budget crisis might be the most important reason. When there is no new money to throw at science, the only way to improve its social value is to tighten how the old money is spent. And science policies under Obama are beginning to add up to a strategy to correct the greatest weakness of the US research enterprise: the isolation of the conduct of science from its use in society.

In biomedicine, the doubling of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) budget between 1998 and 2003 did not reduce the stunningly high failure rates and costs of drug development. To confront this problem, the Obama administration created the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), which was approved by Congress in December 2011. Central to NCATS’ vision, says NIH director Francis Collins, are partnerships between “government, academia, philanthropy, patient advocates, and biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies to overcome translational roadblocks and offer solutions to detect, treat and prevent disease”. Despite forecasts of doom, basic science in the United States stands preeminent, as shown by the ongoing harvest of Nobel prizes. But where is the pay-off for the rest of society? The bankruptcy of Detroit in Michigan, once the world auto-industry capital, underscores the need for new science-based technology sectors to create jobs for millions of people, yet it also makes apparent the lack of connection between scientific excellence and economic well-being. To help close this gap, the Obama administration last year created the National Additive Manufacturing Institute. Focused on three-dimensional printing, it is located in the ‘rust belt’ city of Youngstown, Ohio, and was launched with a US$30-million government contribution matched by corporate funds. In May, the president announced three more manufacturing institutes, each to be “a regional hub designed to bridge the gap between basic research and product development, bringing together companies, universities and community colleges, and federal agencies to co-invest in technology areas”.

More here.

Kirill Medvedev: it's no good

Keith Gessen at n+1:

In fact I think Medvedev is Russia’s first genuinely post-Soviet writer. And I’m happy to report that he has returned, in his way, to the Russian literary world—but on his own terms. The Free Marxist Press has expanded—its first full-length book, Terry Eagleton’s Marxism and Literary Criticism, translated by Medvedev, came out in 2010, and since then the press has published writings by Žižek, Badiou, the French sociologist and philosopher Michael Löwy, as well as Russian writers on revolutionary history, protest, and the Soviet dissident movement. It has grown in seriousness, prestige, and import, becoming, in effect, post-Soviet Russia’s first independent left-wing publisher, putting out the works of its own people and those sympathetic to it, just as Medvedev calls for in “My Fascism.” In late 2011 it published as a separate book a long, rhyming poem by Medvedev about interviewing Claude Lanzmann, the friend of Sartre and director of Shoah, on a visit he made to Moscow. In 2009 Medvedev founded a rock band, Arkady Kots—named after a Russian poet and socialist who translated the Internationale into Russian—which now plays with more regularity in Moscow and other cities, usually performing the poems of the art-terrorist Alexander Brener set to guitar and drums. 

more here.

STRIKING GOLD: Six good books

Maggie Fergusson in More Intelligent Life:

The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton, Granta, hardback, out now. Winter 1866, and a Scot newly arrived in the New Zealand goldfields stumbles on a motley conclave—opium dealer, card-sharp, cleric—debating recent happenings. One man's dead, another's disappeared, and the local whore has apparently attempted suicide. So opens this 832-page masterpiece, daunting to pick up, impossible to put down. Tale is laid upon tale, and everyone is forced to confront his own darkness. Like a juggler, Catton throws hundreds of balls in the air, and somehow catches them all. Shades of Wilkie Collins and Sarah Waters, but her style is distinct and vigorous. She doesn't so much tell her story as inhabit it, amused by her characters' foibles, yet able to reflect on the human condition with a wisdom normally associated with great age. Eleanor Catton is 28.

An Officer and a Spy by Robert Harris, Hutchinson, hardback, out now. Robert Harris is unrivalled when it comes to turning complex history into thriller fiction. Here, in a novel faithful to historical fact, he unravels one of the most notorious miscarriages of justice ever known: the conviction of a Jewish army officer, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, for spying, and his condemnation in 1895 to a "death worse than death" on Devil’s Island. Told in the first person by Colonel Georges Picquard, who eventually established Dreyfus's innocence and revealed corruption running like rot through the French army, it perfectly captures fin-de-siècle Paris: seedy, febrile and rabidly anti-Semitic. In an eerie foreshadowing of the future Dreyfus travels into exile in a cattle truck. The son of the man who framed him, Charles du Paty de Clam, became head of Jewish affairs in the Vichy government.

More here.

How the Singer Sewing Machine Clothed the Nation

Martha Stewart in Smithsonian:

Isaac Merritt Singer’s Patent No. 8,294 was a vast improvement upon earlier versions, capable of 900 stitches a minute—at a time when the most nimble seamstress could sew about 40. Though the machine was originally designed for manufacturing, Singer saw its domestic potential and created a lighter weight version, which he hauled to country fairs, circuses and social gatherings, dazzling the womenfolk. The $50 price tag was steep, but Singer sold thousands on the installment plan. His machine revolutionized manufacturing and industry, transforming the lives of millions and making Singer a very rich man—a classic American story.

My mother inherited a Singer machine from her mother, and she was constantly sewing—her own clothes, clothes for her three daughters, Halloween costumes for all six of her children, and gifts for friends and family. She kept the machine in a corner of our kitchen in Nutley, New Jersey. My sisters and I started out with small projects like aprons and dishtowels, but we were mostly interested in clothes. I took sewing courses in the Nutley public schools and learned to make a blouse with set-in sleeves and a yoke and collar; a pair of cuffed shorts with a zippered-fly front; and a circle skirt. Mother taught me tailoring, interfacing, bias cutting and how to make bound and handmade buttonholes. These were early lessons in diligence, attention to detail and self-reliance. I kept sewing throughout my college years and made all my fancy clothes from designer patterns I got from my friend’s glamorous aunt, who owned a dress shop called Chez Ninon. I made Balenciaga and Dior and Givenchy and fell in love with couture. I even sewed my own wedding dress with the help of my mother, who assisted with the extensive tailoring.

More here.

Wednesday Poem

36 Reasons Why I Want to Grow a Garden

Because I want to plunge my hands into dark rich soil 
Because I want to sweat as I labour over the fork 
I want to taste the salt as I sweat 
I want to smell hard work on my body 
I want my muscles to ache 
and then be soothed by soft rain 
Because I want the open canvas of tilled land 
I want the beauty of level earth, prepared 
I want honest calluses on my hands 
Because I want to feel the rough sleeping seeds 
tumble through my fingers into the ground 
I want to smooth them over with a blanket of soft loam 
I want to watch the birth of green shoots 
as they push themselves towards the sun 
Because I want to lie next to the garden listening to the plants grow 
I want to smell the earth after rain and after sun 
I want to nurture the seedlings into plants 
support them with poles and trellises 
I want to talk them through their adolescence 
Because I want to watch flowers pollinated by bees and butterflies 
I want to see the first fruit 
smell the sun warmth of a fresh tomato 
Because I want to crush aromatic basil plants in my arms 
I want to feel the heavy stalks of corn against my body 
I want to see my hands stained by the chlorophyll of their existence 
I want to watch the plants shine in rising vermilion sun 
and glow in the silver of a full moon 
Because I want to listen to their chatter as they decide their destiny 
I want to harvest the fruit of my labour 
I want to relish each individual vegetable shape in my hands 
drink their beauty with my eyes 
Because I want to feel their unique presence in the world 
I want to press them against my face to feel their textures 
I want know that when I cook them they will be minutes old 
clean of pesticides and pollution 
and when I serve them 
ripe, brilliant and ready on white china 
I want to know that you'll be there

by Jill Battson
from Canadian Poetry Online 

James van Sweden wasn’t just a landscaper; he was a landscaping artist

Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set:

James van Sweden wanted his gardens to be a holistic experience, something to stand in the middle of, be enveloped by, residing somewhere between art and wilderness. Van Sweden wanted to design gardens that had the boldness of a wild landscape, lush and full and free, gardens that moved even when the wind wasn’t blowing, with dramatic contrasts of texture and height and color. Van Sweden thought a garden ought to have a powerful smell and include plants that you could stroke, like the velvety Stachys byzantine, which feels like the ears of a lamb. Touch was even more important to van Sweden than color, for human beings are tactile creatures. Time’s effect on the garden was paramount and each plant was carefully chosen in its relationship to the seasons. Some people thought Oehme and van Sweden’s gardens most beautiful in the winter. “Time is the gardener’s friend and foe,” wrote van Sweden, “always working its relentless changes. Gardening teaches us patience... But gardens can also teach us to live more in the moment — to listen, to watch, to touch, and to dream as the garden works its peaceful magic.” Van Sweden thought a garden could be experienced like a poem or a story. There was meaning in every lichen-covered stone, every changing leaf, and that meaning could emerge from the same mystery contained in wild nature. “Out of vast, unknowable nature comes the freedom to form new thoughts, or to notice some tiny wonder for the first time… It is not necessary that meaning be written in the garden, only that you discover personal meaning and be transformed.” Even a tiny garden plot on a tenement balcony could achieve the romance of a meadow, if given the right attention. Sometimes Oehme and van Sweden’s New American Garden style was also called New Romantic.

more here.

Kindred Spirits

Barbara J King in Aeon:

Most animals for whom we have data treat their kin differently from non-kin. When food resources are scarce, or a hungry predator appears in the midst of an animal group, it’s often relatives who help each other out. This makes good evolutionary sense: when one animal aids another who shares its genes, it boosts the chances that its own genes will be long-lived.

Nowadays, however, as I study and write about the expression of emotion in a variety of mammals, I have come to realise that this perspective is too limiting. If we make the biology of kinship the primary motivator for an animal’s behaviour, we might be slow to explore the nature of its other social relationships. Indeed, some scientists have begun to describe the close bonds between non-kin relatives as ‘friendships’, in species ranging from chimpanzees and elephants to domestic and farm animals. This is an encouraging trend. I think we can go further, especially by borrowing a new concept from anthropology that Marshall Sahlins calls mutuality of being.

Mutuality of being refers to a special type of relationship, one that overlaps with friendship but has its own distinct qualities. To qualify as friends, two animals must engage in positive social interactions beyond the context of mating and reproduction. In her pioneering field study Sex and Friendship in Baboons (1985), Barbara Smuts used grooming and proximity to decide which male and female baboons were friends. More broadly, the anthropologists Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney, professors at the University of Pennsylvania, define friendships as close, enduring social bonds, including those that form between males and between females.

More here.

Camus & Algeria: The Moral Question

Claire Messud review Albert Camus's Algerian Chronicles, in the NYRB:

My father, like Camus, attended the Lycée Bugeaud, where Jacques Derrida was his classmate (“I always did better than him in philosophy,” my father said), and the Faculté, where he studied law. In 1952, he departed for the United States on a Fulbright Scholarship—the list of French recipients that year shows him to be the lone student from Algeria—and thereafter he would always live in exile, in France, Australia, or North America. But surely he left home without appreciating that it would prove impossible to return.

My grandfather, just eight years older than Camus, hailed from still more modest origins in Blida, southwest of Algiers. His mother, an elementary school teacher and the daughter of an illiterate garçon de café, raised four children alone. The youngest, my grandfather, was, like Camus, a beneficiary of the meritocratic French education system of the period, and made his way from remote poverty to the prestigious École Polytechnique in Paris, after which he entered the navy as a career officer. A devout Catholic and passionate French patriot, he also adored his native Algeria: letters between my grandparents wax as lyrical about their beloved landscapes as they do about each other.

Nobody in my family ever spoke about the Algerian War. They told many stories about the 1930s and 1940s, when my father and aunt were children; but of what happened later, they were silent. In 1955, my grandfather took a position in Rabat, Morocco, and my grandparents did not live in Algeria again. In the late 1950s, when the war in Algeria was at its most fevered and vicious, my father was doing graduate work on Turkey at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard: after his death, among his papers from that period, I found files of clippings on political upheavals in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Pakistan, India, Morocco, Libya, in addition to Turkey—but not one word about his homeland. My father’s lonely tears twenty-five years ago were, as far as I know, his only expression of emotion about what happened.

More here.

How Has Twitter Changed the Role of the Literary Critic?

Adam Kirsch and Anna Holmes on social media’s effect on criticism, in the NYT's Bookends:

[Adam Kirsch] At first glance, it seems that critics, in particular, should relish a tool like Twitter. Criticism is a kind of argument, and Twitter is excellent for arguing back and forth in public. Criticism is also a kind of reportage, and Twitter is an ideal way of breaking news. With many major events, from presidential debates to the Oscars, it is more informative and entertaining to follow them in real time on Twitter than it is to actually watch them. For all these reasons, journalists have been especially avid users of Twitter.

Critics, however, have been surprisingly reluctant to embrace the tweet. Many of the most prominent are not on Twitter at all. Those who are tend to use their feeds for updates on their daily lives, or to share links, or at most to recommend articles or books — that is, they use Twitter in the way everyone else does. What is hard to find on Twitter is any real practice of criticism, anything that resembles the sort of discourse that takes place in an essay or a review.

This absence, like the dog that didn’t bark in Sherlock Holmes, may be an important clue to the true nature of criticism. Never in history has it been easier than it is today to register one’s approval or disapproval of anything. The emblem of our age is the thumbs-up of the “like” button. If criticism is nothing more than a drawn-out version of a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down, there’s no reason it shouldn’t be made obsolete by the retweet or the five-star Amazon review. Cut to the chase, the Internet demands, of critics and everyone else: Should we buy this thing or not?

More here.

The lady who conquered Napoleon

Virginia Rounding in The Telegraph:

In this new biography of the Empress Josephine, first wife of Napoleon Bonaparte, Kate Williams (whose previous biographical subjects have included Emma Hamilton and the young Queen Victoria) embarks on a whirlwind tour of French history. She covers the conditions of slaves in Martinique, the turmoil of the Revolution and subsequent Terror, and the rise, apotheosis and downfall of Napoleon, in just over 300 pages. If the breathless pace of the writing does not entirely lend itself to in-depth analysis, it does suit the heroine of the tale. For Josephine, like Napoleon, leaves one somewhat breathless. As Williams summarises her existence, she was “a mistress, a courtesan, a Revolutionary heroine, a collector, a patron and an Empress… in the words of one of her friends, 'an actor, who could play all roles’.” For all the tempestuousness of the relationship between Napoleon and Josephine, they were a supremely well-matched couple – not only physically (it was sexual love that really bound them together) but also in their daring, their self-invention, their attainment of dazzling success out of humble beginnings. Williams has made extensive use of the voluminous correspondence of both of these larger-than-life characters, from which it is clear that part of their mutual fascination was indeed this similarity of character.

Born Marie Josèphe Rose (it was Napoleon who later chose to call her Josephine) in 1763, into the sugar-plantation-owning Tascher de la Pagerie family, Josephine was no natural beauty nor endowed with any obvious talents. Her education was desultory, and she appeared destined to stay on Martinique and marry another plantation-owner. But Josephine had other ideas, and opportunity presented itself in the shape of a young man three years her senior, Alexandre de Beauharnais, the son of her aunt’s lover.

More here.

Maybe Heaven Can Wait, but a Customer Can’t

Phyllis Korkki in The New York Times:

“Patience is a virtue,” we are taught. And when you think about it, much of our life is spent waiting for something rather than experiencing it, so that waiting becomes an experience in itself, filled with anticipation, annoyance, boredom or fear. Waiting is a ripe subject for business researchers, it turns out. One effect of waiting is that people place more value on what they are waiting for, says Ayelet Fishbach, a professor of behavioral science and marketing at the University of Chicago. “If you give people exactly what they want at the moment they want it, they might want it less,” she says.

...In E.R.’s, people are seen based on the severity of their medical condition. If you are otherwise going to die in the next half-hour, you get to jump to the front of the line. But fellow patients may not realize this, and seeing someone who only just arrived go first can upset people’s sense of fairness. Some may leave the waiting room because they feel cheated, Professor Terwiesch says. Typically, hospitals don’t tell patients how long they may have to wait, and patients waiting in the E.R. have no idea when they will be called: “Every time the door opens, your adrenaline goes up.” He found that people in E.R.’s are constantly seeking visual clues as to who might be treated next. But these clues can mislead. At peak hours, an E.R. at full capacity may be able to handle 10 people quickly, yet it may not initially look that way to the 10th person in the waiting room. Professor Terwiesch recommends that hospitals create multiple waiting rooms so that patients don’t try to monitor one another this way.

More here.

Raoul Wallenberg: heroism and the long silence

Cynthia Haven at The Book Haven:

Jangfeldt’s research revealed a startling fact: Wallenberg had at least 15 kilograms of gold and jewelry in his car when the Red Army arrested him in 1945. Again, why?  Jangfeldt suggests that this was the amassed fortune of many of the Jewish victims Wallenberg had helped, who had left their valuables with him for safekeeping. He wished to return them at the war’s end to help them rebuild their lives. It seems like a reckless risk, but perhaps he had gotten away with so much, so often, that he had begun to feel invulnerable.  In any case, the decision may have been the fatal one.

In April 1945, Averell Harriman, acting on behalf of the U.S. State Department, offered the Swedish government American help in making inquiries about Wallenberg’s fate. His offer was declined.  Jangfeldt called this “a symbol of Swedish passivity.”  The Swedes persuaded themselves that Wallenberg had been killed in Hungary – “the assumption that he had been killed in Budapest was very cynical,” Jangfeldt said. We now know he was taken to the Soviet Union’s notorious prisons, Lefortovo and later the Lubyanka.

The Soviet foreign service reassured the Swedes that they had conducted an investigation, and that they knew of no one named Wallenberg in the Soviet prison system. 

more here.

the US-Mexican border: where the American past chokes on itself

Greg Grandin at The Nation:

Exhausted migrants crawl into caves and die, their remains never recovered or their bones, picked clean by carrion birds and other animals, disappearing into the sand. A Texas rancher recently told a reporter that only one out of every four bodies is found, which would put the death toll at well over 20,000. Patrick Ball, a statistician who works with human rights groups to count the victims of mass atrocities—93,000 in Syria, 69,000 in Peru, 18,000 in Timor-Leste—says that in order to arrive at an accurate ratio of total dead migrants to known remains, one would need “several independent enumerations of people you can identify as having died in the way you’re studying.” Each list would have to survey roughly the same area of the desert and include the name of the victim and the approximate location and date of death. 

But migrants often don’t travel with identification, and the reliable data that do exist are spread out over California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, fragmented among morgues, hospitals, police departments and the Border Patrol. Some of those who perish during the trek don’t do so until they are well into the United States or have staggered back into Mexico. 

more here.

The assassination of J.F.K., fifty years later

Adam Gopnik at The New Yorker:

The nation really did get turned inside out when Kennedy was killed, as nations do at the death of kings. But what altered? In many ways, it was a time more past than present. Though it’s said that the event marked the decisive move from page to screen, newspaper to television, all the crucial information was channelled through the wire-service reporters, who, riding six cars back from the President’s, were the first to get and send the news of the shots, and were still thought of as the authoritative source. Walter Cronkite’s two most famous moments—breaking into “As the World Turns” to announce, “In Dallas, Texas, three shots were fired”; and his later, holding-back-tears “From Dallas, Texas, the flash, apparently official: President Kennedy died at 1 p.m. Central Standard Time”—were in both cases simply read from the wire-service copy. You can see the assistants ripping the copy from the teleprinter and rushing it to the anchorman.

Yet an imbalance between the flood of information and the uncertainty of our understanding—the sense that we know so much and grasp so little, and that reality becomes an image passing—does seem to have begun then: the postmodern suspicion that the more we see, the less we know. A compulsive “hyperperspicacity,” in the term of one assassination researcher—the tendency to look harder for pattern than the thing looked at will ever provide—became the motif of the time.

more here.

Whither pragmatism?

by Dave Maier

Last month, a couple of commenters on my post on Dennett's plea for "respect for truth" asked what pragmatists I like, and for a general elaboration of my pragmatism. I had to think about the best way to respond, and this is what I have finally come up with. Sorry for the delay!

There's a famous article called something like "Thirteen Types of Pragmatism". This is a typically pragmatist attitude: forget universal definitions, just tell me what we've got. That's what we'll do here; but even so, we'll be keeping an eye on why we want to call these things "pragmatism" at all. After all, that same attitude tells to abandon "pragmatism" if it stops being useful, and I'm happy to call myself something else if it helps.

1) Pragmatism as practice over theory

We don't need to be exhaustive here, just to link some ideas together. A good place to start in characterizing pragmatism is the ordinary not-necessarily-philosophical idea of giving priority to practice itself over any theoretical understanding of that same practice. Pragmatists of this sort say: forget the operating manual, just do what experience tells you about what works. Engineers revel in the perceived virtue of this attitude: dirt under the fingernails and all that.

2) Pragmatism as science over metaphysics

But this is stacking the deck. Naturally even theorists recognize the priority in this sense of that which is represented over the necessarily merely derivative representation of same. If the manual says the engine will explode if you use such-and-such type of fuel, but experience shows otherwise, then the manual is wrong. A related but more philosophically consequential pragmatist attitude pits the empirical world of our experience against a purported "metaphysical" world of abstractions and essences.

There's only one world, of course; the question instead concerns the best method of investigating it. Theory is okay on pragmatist grounds if it is scientifically respectable, as after all Newton's laws of motion are as theoretical as you can get, and we're not giving those up. This is better than the previous thought, but it still stacks the deck. Here too metaphysicians recognize the importance of connecting what they say about the world with what we experience. Still, metaphysics isn't science, and can't be dismissed on those grounds alone, if at all.

3) Pragmatism as anti-Cartesianism

On the other hand, "metaphysics" remains a natural term of abuse for pragmatists, as is the idea of a world beyond experience. Historically, pragmatists have attacked that "metaphysical" idea most directly in its Cartesian manifestation, for example as implicated in that version of skepticism. Cartesians are best known for mind-body substance dualism, but they don't need that particular idea to motivate their skepticism. All they need is a more general conceptual dualism of subject and object.

Now this sort of pragmatism looks like the kind I like: the kind dedicated to rooting out the many pernicious manifestations of that Cartesian idea. Unfortunately, however, in combating each of these one by one (e.g. skepticism in particular), by my lights pragmatists have often failed to stay focused on the dualism itself. I actually think this was unavoidable, and I don't want to take any credit away from our honored ancestors. I just want to distinguish this sort of pragmatist "anti-Cartesianism" from later versions (like mine, below). So again, the problem with Cartesian skepticism is the underlying conceptual dualism; but in any case we must address it epistemologically. Most of our knowledge is defeasible: its truth is not guaranteed, by evidence or conviction or anything else. So why doesn't that mean that "it might be false" -- and thus that we shouldn't believe it, but instead remain uncommitted? The characteristically pragmatist answer to this is to argue that doubt must be justified just as much as belief does. However, the Cartesian withholds belief solely on theoretical grounds, i.e. that the objectivity of the world means that any defeasible belief of ours could be false without our knowing.

The original pragmatist, C. S. Peirce, attacks this attitude as a pretence, or "paper doubt". We may say we are in doubt, but when push comes to shove, or even before that, we find that we act just as if we knew -- which for a pragmatist means that we believe after all. All we need do is recognize that our beliefs might not be fully true, but hold on to them anyway if that's what we need to do. This has been a very inflential take on the problem, even beyond pragmatism, but we can't leave it there. "Fallibilism," as this view is called, seems to me simply to amount to skepticism in the end. How can we say we believe, if at the same time we hold back from full commitment?

4) Isaac Levi and pragmatist epistemology

Isaac Levi is a contemporary pragmatist who was a teacher of mine at Columbia (home of many famous pragmatists, including John Dewey and Sidney Morgenbesser). His views are not well known, which is a shame, as I think his take on properly pragmatist epistemology is just what we need (the pictured book rocks). Levi regards knowledge, perfectly pragmatically on my view, as "a resource in inquiry and deliberation" – something we use to decide what to believe (that is, how things are) and what to do.

A resource is a tool, and not every tool is a mirror or even a map; yet surely our resource won't be very resourceful if there's no connection to the world at all. And knowledge, as a species of belief, necessarily (if not uncontroversially) aims at truth. Here in a nutshell is the pragmatist attitude, sort of the inverse of Ronald Reagan's attitude toward arms control: verify, but trust.

Levi's main innovation in this context is a correction of Peirce's fallibilism. While fallibilists claim to believe, they allow that what they believe "might not be true" -- and thus that they are in doubt after all. Levi's "infallibilism" takes belief seriously as a commitment: as far as I'm concerned, my beliefs are true with probability 1; anything less isn't belief at all.

Two comments about this before we move on. Most opposition to infallibilism, even among pragmatists, comes from the utility (naturally enough) of the idea of degrees of belief, which can be used, if quantified, in probability calculations of the Bayesian sort. Theoretically, however, this latter idea is problematic in its capitulation to skepticism (and also see below). In any case Levi deals with this in his discussion of what he calls "credal states" (which I never actually studied in any detail, so let's leave it there).

Also, infallibilists must still make sense of the corrigible nature of belief: that we (sometimes) respond to new evidence by changing our belief commitments. Levi's "corrigibilism", however, in acknowledging this, simply registers the theoretical possibility of error, without allowing that to affect our full commitment to our current beliefs.

Okay, one more thing. I can't give this a full defense, but another important aspect of Levi's views is his formal definition of knowledge, in line with his conception of it as a resource, as merely true belief, rather than the usual definition as justified true belief (JTB). For after all, if I believe something I must have already taken it to be justified, making the latter idea an idle wheel. More precisely, Levi doesn't abandon the idea of justification, but sees it as applying not to belief itself, but instead to change in belief (and thus, in line with the original pragmatist idea, as applying just as much to giving belief up as to adopting it). Not only does this make more sense, it dissolves into nothing the famous "Gettier problem" in epistemology, which has had philosophers looking for another condition on knowledge to add to JTB rather than taking justification away.

5) Pragmatism as anti-dualism: post-Davidsonian/post-Wittgensteinian approaches

As I mentioned above, I construe the Cartesian heresy broadly as the conceptual dualism beween subject and object. We've already seen it as mind-body substance dualism, and as the epistemic gulf responsible for Cartesian skepticism, but this thing has roots leading all the way back to the Platonic Ideas (or, paradoxically, to the Parmenidean One). Here I follow Richard Rorty, who deserves a lot more credit than the abuse he got from both sides: from traditional pragmatists for changing its focus, and from traditional non-pragmatists for all the usual reasons. Even his biggest fans have to admit that Rorty made some mistakes; but he brought some crucial, even game-changing new voices into the conversation.

Reading Rorty turned me on to Donald Davidson, whom he interpreted not (simply) as the post-Quinean analytic philosopher he seems, but as a pragmatist in this extended sense. On this reading, Davidson's attack on what he called the "dualism of conceptual scheme and empirical content" is the natural next step, after Quine's naturalistic rejection of the analytic-synthetic distinction, in the continuing rollback of Cartesianism. Davidon always resisted the pragmatist label, but surely our concern is not the name, nor even Davidson's own opinion of the significance of his views, but what use we can make of his innovations for our continuing project.

What use is that?  What I like here is the way Davidson's conception of inquiry (belief) as essentially connected with interpretation (meaning) shifts from seeing language as a (semantic and epistemic) intermediary (a conception which leads directly to skepticism) to seeing it as a medium of experience and thought.  This "triangular" picture (speaker -- interpreter -- world) is the ideal stage for a resolutely anti-dualist picture.

Let's leave the details of Davidson's death blow to the Cartesian picture for another time. The other key philosopher Rorty brought into the picture was Wittgenstein (he was also keen on Heidegger, but I'm not feeling it there). Here too he got abuse from both sides: Wittgenstein acolytes not happy with Rorty's appropriation of their hero as a pragmatist (of all things), and everyone else for, again, the usual reasons. Now it's true that Wittgenstein is not a pragmatist in any usual sense; but I think he provides a few key parts to our developing anti-Cartesian conception of philosophy.

Somewhat paradoxically, we turn to Wittgenstein most effectively after we've brought Davidson into it. At this point the dualist is on the mat, but it's really easy to let him slip out of our grip. For we've already allowed that however useful our beliefs may be, as beliefs their truth can always be brought into question. So how about Davidson's philosophical theory of interpretation itself? Is that true?

Wittgenstein is usually interpreted as rejecting philosophical theory entirely (as a philosophical "quietist"). But we do better to extend our anti-dualist attitude to the next level: the dualism between philosophical theory and everyday statements of fact. Wittgenstein's early work seems to emphasize, not attack, that distinction; but even in the Tractatus he was concerned to affirm the importance of that which is left after we have restricted intelligible discourse to the latter. It's natural to read Philosophical Investigations as the appropriate correction: theoretical discourse isn't meaningless, it's just another form of language. Just because it's about another kind of language doesn't mean it's not also about the world (and can thus be considered true in a natural sense). But here too we'll have to come back to this some other time.

6) Pragmatism as pluralism: interpretivism and perspectivism

At this point (i.e. even with Wittgensteinian help) we're still grappling with the proper status of philosophical belief. It seems like it needs to be true, on pain of irrelevance, or unintelligibility as belief; yet this need seems to reinvite skeptical attack. Again, the positivist strain in early pragmatism would have us reject "theory" in favor of scientific practice, which is necessarily empirical as opposed to a priori (which, I grant, in some contexts can be just the ticket). But another way to oppose "theory" [or "metaphysics") is to oppose metaphysical realism, which demands that using philosophical theory at all requires that it mirror reality in the disputed sense: one which means that we can't believe something in one context but not another based on our needs. (It can't be true and then not true simply because of how we feel like talking! That's idealism!)

Here again we may turn to Levi's conception of knowledge -- here applied specifically to philosophical theory -- as a resource or tool. We have plenty of tools in our toolbox without demanding that each of them be useful in all cases. We may appeal to Davidson at one point and Wittgenstein at another, without demanding that their views be melted down into an amalgam for universal use (as it sometimes seems that John McDowell, another philospher I admire, is trying to do). The trick, again, is to reconcile this sort of pluralism with the proper sort of respect for truth, which I discussed last month. I've also discussed this idea under the name "perspectivism" in my posts here on Nietzsche (like this one, and earlier here). When Nietzsche commends the "healthy" individual as keeping his "Pro and Con" under control, this is what I see him doing: taking control of truth, using it in service of knowledge rather than meekly attempting to mirror it as metaphysics (that is, metaphysical realism) demands.

So I hope that helps situate last month's remarks with respect to pragmatism. I'll stop here, but no doubt there will be plenty of opportunity later on, when I try to defend my quasi-pragmatist uses of Wittgenstein and Davidson, to hold my feet to the fire.

SYMMETRY BREAKING, THE HIGGS BOSON & ABDUS SALAM

by Tasneem Zehra Husain

Over the past two years, the Higgs Boson has seeped into the popular consciousness, and with the announcement of this year's Nobel Prize, it is in the limelight once again. Yet, many people are still not quite sure what this particle is, and what, if anything, it has to do with Pakistan's only Laureate, Abdus Salam.

The 2013 Nobel Prize for Physics recognized a mechanism whereby the breaking of symmetry causes a field to pervade the vacuum. To get a sense of what that means, think of the vacuum as the blank canvas upon which our universe is painted, and the Higgs field as a color wash covering the canvas. Had the canvas been pure white, the 'true' colors of our painting would show up; instead, we experience colors after they have been tinted by the background - the Higgs field taints our perception. Just because the canvas is blank doesn't mean there's nothing on it!

Vast ideas have many sides, and often, a different metaphor is needed to explain each facet. One catch phrase regarding the Higgs Boson is that it explains the origin of mass. To understand the connection, consider how we experience mass. When asked to judge how heavy something is, an instinctive reaction is to try pushing the object in question. Intuition tells us that if the same force is exerted on two objects, the heavier one moves slower than the lighter. If two balls, pushed with equal force across a flat surface move with the same speed, we conclude their masses are equal.

But what if the balls carry electric charge, and we perform this experiment in the background of a constant electric field? We might find one ball moves slower than the other, and mistakenly conclude that it is heavier, whereas in truth the masses of both are the same. The discrepancy arises because first ball is pushed in a direction where its motion is resisted by the field, whereas the second ball is pushed in an unaffected direction, and so, proceeds at its natural speed.

In a symmetric universe no direction would be singled out, and regardless of its orientation, very ball would whizz around equally fast. If, however, we introduce a field that violates symmetry, we can pick out a 'special' direction, along which balls will move slower, and hence, appear more massive.

Just as an electric field can be oriented along any axis, the Higgs field too, is free to choose a direction. An illustrative example is that of a marble in a Mexican hat. Poised on the hump of the sombrero, the marble is surrounded with infinite possibilities, each as good as the next, but its position is precarious and almost impossible to maintain. Sooner or later, it will roll down into the circular rim, spontaneously breaking the symmetry. The direction in which the marble falls is completely random; the point on the rim where it lands is not distinguished in any way, until by virtue of the marble landing, it becomes the point of reference for everything that happens from then on.

Mass, which we had thought of as an intrinsic attribute, turns out to be a perceived quantity, a manifestation of the interaction between an object and the background. Particles which appear identical in the absence of a field can take on a variety of appearances in its presence.

In 1964, Higgs, Brout & Englert, and Guralnik, Hagen & Kibble, had (independently) concluded that a vacuum does not necessarily connote the absence of everything, but could in fact be suffused with a field, which explicitly breaks symmetry. While this mechanism was used in subsequent theories, it was hard to prove explicitly. Think back to the color wash on the canvas. If something is everywhere, if it pervades space and forms the background for all we perceive, how do we convince ourselves it is really there? The detection of the Higgs Boson at CERN last year was hailed with such excitement because it provided long sought evidence for the existence of the Higgs field, and - almost fifty years later - the theory of the interplay between symmetry breaking and mass, was finally lauded with the Nobel Prize.

What does any of this have to do with Abdus Salam? In 1979, Sheldon Glashow, Abdus Salam and Steven Weinberg were awarded the Nobel Prize for showing that the familiar electromagnetic force, and the relatively newly discovered weak nuclear force (responsible for radioactivity, among other things) were in fact the same fundamental force in different guises. The claim was truly audacious. There were many glaring distinctions between the two forces; for starters, unlike electromagnetism, the weak force is alchemical and can transform one particle into another; but even more problematic was the discrepancy in their ranges. Electromagnetic attraction and repulsion is felt across large distances, whereas the weak force dies out at nuclear scales.

It was already known that forces are transported across space by particles; the carriers of each force have certain unique characteristics, in keeping with their 'message'. The electromagnetic force can travels across large distances, at the speed of light, because its force-carrier, the photon, is massless. The weak force only survives subatomic distances because its force carriers (called the W-, W+ and Z bosons) are very heavy.

The weak and electromagnetic forces could only be tied together if their force carriers were united. This is when Glashow, Salam and Weinberg used the model created by Higgs and others. The apparent imbalance in mass was not an intrinsic feature of the force carriers, they said, but the manifestation of a broken symmetry. When the Universe was just born, perfect symmetry prevailed and the W+, W-, Z and the photon were indistinguishable. With the passage of time, asymmetries developed spontaneously and the vacuum was pervaded with a Higgs field. As a result of their various interactions with the Higgs field, three of these particles acquired masses, while one remained massless. Consequently, their apparent behavior diverged so much that the forces they carried began to seem completely different.

Abdus Salam used the following analogy to explain: look at ice and water', he wrote. 'They can co-exist at zero degrees Centigrade, although they are very distinct with different properties. However, if you increase the temperature you find that they represent the same fundamental reality, the same fluid. Similarly, we thought that if you could conceive of a Universe which was very, very hot ... then it was our contention that the weak nuclear force would exhibit the same long-range character as the electromagnetic force. You would then see the unification of these two forces perfectly clearly.' Since we only experience these forces as they are now and not as they were in millennia past, we perceive electromagnetism as being very different to the weak force, whereas in fact the two can be traced back to the same root.

Perfect symmetry is aesthetically appealing, but sterile in practice. Only by breaking the symmetry of the early universe do the fundamental forces take on their unique guises, causing matter to coalesce, and form elementary particles, which congeal into atoms that dance around each other, and give rise to our vast and varied world.

There is a huge difference between breaking a symmetry, and not having one at all; in both cases, the end result may look the case, but in the former scenario, there is an underlying simplicity of design, and in the latter, there is no pattern to guide us. Our universe could have preserved symmetry, in which case we would all be frozen in stagnant perfection; or it could have had nothing to do with symmetry, in which case we would be surrounded by chaos. Instead, we find ourselves in an ideal situation where the equations that describe our universe are symmetric, but the solutions are not. As a result, Nature can exhibit immeasurably rich structures while still being economical in essence, and we can make sense of the wild and wonderful phenomena that surround us, by appealing to just a few guiding principles.

perceptions

Rashid Rana. Red Carpet 1, 2007.

Edition 1/5; C-print + DIASEC. H. 95 x W. 135 in. (241.3 x 317.5 cm). Collection of Pallak Seth. Image courtesy of Gallery Chemould and Chattertjee & Lal Mumbai.

"Red Carpet 1 when looked at from a distance is a beautiful deep red carpet. Upon closer inspection, it is revealed that the carpet is made up of images taken in a slaughterhouse. The work reflects the duel existence of Pakistan as a purveyor of beauty and violence.

More here and here.