Month: July 2013

When Literary Giants Become Fanboys

Peter Conradi describes the dynamic between contemporaries Dostoevsky and Tolstoy:

Tolstoy so admired Dostoevsky’s The House of the Dead that he wrote ‘I don’t know a better book in all literature’ and asked a mutual friend to ‘please tell him that I love him’. It was to Tolstoy that the writer Strakhov, who worked with Dostoevsky on literary journals during the 1860s and 1870s, spread the wicked rumour that Dostoevsky had sexually assaulted a nine-year-old girl in a public bathhouse. It is good to find that [biographer Peter] Sekirin gives this tale no credence.

Dostoevsky in his turn expressed great admiration for Anna Karenina, in his own widely read and influential Writer’s Diary. Both passionate — and heterodox — Christians, the two giants were very aware of each other but never met. Dostoevsky acknowledged that he was jealous of his rival’s wealth and equally of his success, and once referred rudely to ‘landlord literature’ with its patrician and pastoral calm. One month before he died in January 1881 Dostoevsky again showed himself ambivalent when announcing that ‘Tolstoy is powerful. He is a great talent. He did not say all he could.’

On The Origin Of Art

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Drawing on evolutionary psychology, Micah Mattix reviews Denis Dutton’s arguments in The Art Instinct:

The first feature of our inclination toward art is that we seem to have a universal love of landscape paintings — and not just any landscape, but landscapes similar to those our ancestors would have encountered on the African savanna. A central pillar of evidence for his argument is a 1993 study commissioned by Russian painters Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid that surveyed people from ten diverse countries and found a surprising number of consistent aesthetic preferences. Dutton writes:

People in almost all nations disliked abstract designs, especially jagged shapes created with a thick impasto in the commonly despised colors of gold, orange, yellow, and teal. This cross-cultural similarity of negative opinion was matched on the positive side by another remarkable uniformity of sentiment: almost without exception, the most-wanted painting was a landscape with water, people, and animals.

Dutton suggests that this seemingly universal preference for paintings depicting open spaces, trees, water, and animals is related to our ancestors’ search for food and safety. Such landscapes would have presented opportunities for cultivation; and the presence of water and climbable clusters of trees — which could have served as lodgings for game and provided safety from predators — would have been preferred by hunter-gatherers to either a dark forest or desolate plains. The emotional response to landscapes, the sense of peace, Dutton suggests, developed from the habitat choice of “people (and proto-people) in the Pleistocene.”

(Image: Petworth Park: Tillington Church in the Distance, J. M. W. Turner, c. 1830, via Wikimedia Commons)

“The Most Competitive Test In The World”

Alex Mayyasi describes the admissions exam for the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT):

The prize is a spot at a university that students describe without hyperbole as a “ticket to another life.” The Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) are a system of technical universities in India comparable in prestige and rigor to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or the California Institute of Technology. Alumni include Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla, co-founder of software giant Infosys Narayana Murthy, and former Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin. Popular paths after graduation include pursuing MBAs or graduate degrees at India’s and the West’s best universities or entertaining offers from McKinsey’s and Morgan Stanley’s on-campus recruiters.

Government subsidies make it possible for any admitted student to attend IIT. The Joint Entrance Exam is also the sole admissions criteria – extracurriculars, personal essays, your family name, and, until recently, even high school grades are all irrelevant. The top scorers receive admission, while the rest do not.

Last year, half a million test-takers competed for ten thousand spots:

In 2012, Harvard accepted 5.9% of applicants. Top engineering schools MIT and Stanford had acceptance rates of 8.9% and 6.63%. The acceptance rate at the IITs, as represented by the pass rate in the JEE, was 2%.

The Best Of The Dish Today

US-ARIZONA-FIRE-TOLL

Egypt reeled on the verge of a popular-supported threatened coup by the military to end the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood. We compiled, as we have done in the past, the tweets of change – as the revolution happened. I refused to forgive Alec Baldwin as a wannabe gay-basher and Bill Clinton as a public figure. As we promised, we provided as much transparency as possible on how well the Dish is faring as an independent media company, supported only by readers (who gave us our single best day in subscriptions since April); and we re-read Forster in the wake of Windsor.

The four most popular posts were all about Alec Baldwin’s boot.

See you in the morning.

(Photo: Nineteen American flags hang on a fence outside of the Granite Mountain Hotshot Fire Station 7 in Prescott, Arizona on July 1, 2013. Reinforcements poured in Monday to battle a runaway wildfire that quadrupled in size overnight after killing 19 firefighters in one of the worst such incidents in US history. The Yarnell Hill fire – which killed all but one member of a 20-strong ‘hotshot’ team – was the biggest loss of firefighters’ lives since the September 11 attacks, and the most from a US wildfire in 80 years. By Krista Kennell/AFP/Getty Images)

Wining And Opining

Curious about the outcomes of wine-tasting competitions, winemaker Robert Hodgson collaborated with the organizers of the California State Fair:

Each panel of four judges would be presented with their usual “flight” of samples to sniff, sip and slurp. But some wines would be presented to the panel three times, poured from the same bottle each time. The results would be compiled and analysed to see whether wine testing really is scientific. The first experiment took place in 2005. The last was in Sacramento earlier this month. Hodgson’s findings have stunned the wine industry. Over the years he has shown again and again that even trained, professional palates are terrible at judging wine.

“The results are disturbing,” says Hodgson from the Fieldbrook Winery in Humboldt County, described by its owner as a rural paradise. “Only about 10% of judges are consistent and those judges who were consistent one year were ordinary the next year. Chance has a great deal to do with the awards that wines win.”

Alex Mayyasi recently reviewed research on wine-tasting:

[W]hat these studies really tell us is that our idea of taste as a constant, even if appreciated in subjectively different ways, is a fiction. Due to the complicated way that we experience taste – as an amalgamation of information from all 5 senses, our expectations, and how we think about what we are tasting – taste is easily manipulated.

In Praise Of Messy Poems

Ali Shapiro describes her infatuation with her favorite collection of poetry, Richard Siken’s Crush:

I literally carried Crush everywhere I went for three or four years. It was like my poetry-security blanket. Which is funny, because Crush offers little security—in fact, it totally upended my entire aesthetic sense of self as both a reader and a writer.

Before Crush, I was afraid of messy poems. I liked my poems short n’ sweet n’ clever, with last lines that tied everything up in neat little bows, almost like punch lines.

But the poems in Crush are decidedly, unapologetically messy. They hurtle; they sprawl. They end awkwardly. They blurt out their secrets. After I read Crush, everything else felt limp, stale, tame.

In her search for similar writing, she realized what her favorite poems had in common – nearly all of them were penned by gay men. One possible explanation? The way they plumb the relationship between sex and death:

The sex/death connection is hardly revolutionary (see also: la petit mort). But death feels especially present in these poems—sometimes spectral, sometimes explicit, but often inextricably tied to sex and desire. Taken together, these lines suggest a world in which intimacy can be contagious, toxic, risky.

Surprises At The Edge Of The Solar System

Voyager I has discovered several:

In three studies published Thursday in the journal Science, Voyager researchers provided the most detailed view yet of a mysterious region more than 11 billion miles from Earth, where the sun’s ferocious solar winds slow to a whisper and pieces of atoms blasted across the galaxy by ancient supernovae drift into the solar system. The area, which has been dubbed the “magnetic highway,” is a newly discovered area of the heliosphere, the vast bubble of magnetism that surrounds the planets and is inflated by gusting solar winds. Like Earth’s magnetosphere, which shields us from radioactive solar winds, the heliosphere shields the solar system from many of the cosmic rays that fill interstellar space. …

Toward the end of July 2012, Voyager 1‘s instruments reported that solar winds had suddenly dropped by half, while the strength of the magnetic field almost doubled, according to the studies. Those values then switched back and forth five times before they became fixed on Aug. 25. Since then, solar winds have all but disappeared, but the direction of the magnetic field has barely budged. “The jumps indicate multiple crossings of a boundary unlike anything observed previously,” a team of Voyager scientists wrote in one of the studies.

Adam Mann adds, “No one is entirely sure what’s going on”:

“It’s a huge surprise,” said astronomer Merav Opher of Boston University, who was not involved in the work. While the new observations are fascinating, they are likely something that theorists will debate about for some time, she added. “In some sense we have touched the intergalactic medium,” Opher said, “but we’re still inside the sun’s house.”

Extending this analogy, it’s almost as if Voyager thought it was going outside but instead found itself standing in the foyer of the sun’s home with an open door that allows wind to blow in from the galaxy. Not only were scientists not expecting this foyer to exist, they have no idea how long the probe will stay inside of it. Stone speculated that the probe could travel some months or years before it reaches interstellar space.

“But it could happen any day,” he added. “We don’t have a model to tell us that.” Even then, Stone said, Voyager would not have really left the solar system but merely the region where the solar wind dominates.

Alex Knapp notes that the Voyager crafts still have years of life in them:

It’s not clear yet when Voyager 1 will leave the solar system – scientists won’t know for sure until it actually gets there. That could be anywhere from a few months to a few years away. It’s sister craft,Voyager 2, is also expected to enter interstellar space, but that will be some time later. Both probes have enough power to last to 2020, so we should learn quite a bit about interstellar space before they fall silent.

Mataconis’s take:

In terms of pure science, we’ve arguably gotten more from these two small unmanned craft than we have from the manned space program itself. That’s not too shabby.

A Powerful Piece Of Historical Fiction

Last week, the Obamas peered out of the Door of No Return, a part of Goree Island’s House of Slaves where, the story goes, “Africans were held before going through the door and being shipped off the continent as slaves.” Max Fisher discovers that the site’s history isn’t so straightforward:

If you ask the stewards of this museum on Goree Island what happened there, they’ll likely refer you to the plaques on the wall, which say that millions of slaves passed through the building that Obama visited Thursday, now called the House of Slaves. … But if you ask Africa scholars, they’ll tell you a very different story. “There are literally no historians who believe the Slave House is what they’re claiming it to be, or that believe Goree was statistically significant in terms of the slave trade,” Ralph Austen, who as a professor emeritus at the University of Chicago has written several academic articles on the subject, told the Associated Press.

But door remains an important landmark regardless:

Katharina Schramm, in a book on the role of history in African ideologies today, called the Door of No Return a symbol of “the cultural amnesia and sense of disconnection that slavery and the Middle Passage stand for.” The door, she wrote, has become increasingly associated not just with its largely fictional past but with its very real present as a place of historical “healing and closure,” sometimes now described as a “Door of Return” out of slavery’s shadow.

Historical anthropologist François Richard adds his thoughts:

Some people use the history/memory couplet to parse the problem of Gorée’s house of slaves (i.e., history concerned with facts and memory with symbolic value and historical gravity, a mode of affective resonance absolutely central to identities in the African diaspora). It’s not the most satisfying or cutting way of analyzing the phenomenon, but it has the merit of offering a point of entry. What ‘s important to remember, though, is that while the details about the house may not be entirely exact, they do speak to a deeper historical truth – namely, the experience and infamy of turning humanity into a commodity.

A Military Coup In Egypt?

https://twitter.com/basildabh/status/351730727760564225

Gideon Lichfield suspects the protesters are being played and that a “Morsi ouster might not be another victory for the people, but for the military”:

When it became clear that popular support for Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood was overwhelming, the SCAF allowed him to win but passed a series of sweeping measures just before he took office to consolidate its own power and weaken the office of the president. Morsi’s presidency since then has been a power struggle on two fronts, fighting the SCAF with one hand and repressing liberal, anti-Islamist forces with the other.

These two enemies of Morsi may now have found common cause temporarily. And some liberals, like the journalist Mona Eltahawy, believe this uprising will be the real thing—the event that finally tips the balance of power over to the forces of democracy. But there’s another interpretation: The pro-democracy activists are serving as the army’s tool. Once it is back in power, the SCAF will be in no hurry to liberalize; indeed, it is likely to only step up the repression against the Muslim Brotherhood, which remains popular with a sizable chunk of the people.

Steven A. Cook explains the military’s long game:

[T]he military has been at great pains to emphasize that it “respects the presidential authority,” despite whatever problems it detects and concerns it harbors.  All this helps to create the impression that the officers are the ultimate nationalists who only have Egypt’s interests in mind.

This brings one back to the flag-dropping choppers.  It is plausible that the pilots and crews were acting of their own volition, but it seems unlikely.  Those helicopters were dispatched specifically to Tahrir Square.  Could there be any better way to signal to the Egyptian people that the armed forces is with them and, in turn, burnish their prestige and influence after the searing eighteen month transition than to send flags to people waiting in “Liberation Square” below?  As any number of analysts have pointed out, this morning General al Sisi is the most powerful man in Egypt.  To rule, but not govern….

H.A. Hellyer’s view of the situation:

The Egyptian military is not, and never has been, an ideological institution. Its main concerns have been to maintain its independence vis-à-vis the rest of the state, and to ensure the stability of Egypt — without which it would be forced to involve itself in the mess of governing tens of millions of Egyptians. That is what was behind its move to depose Hosni Mubarak in 2011, whose continued presence was perceived as a liability in maintaining stability. It is also what was behind its self-reconstitution in 2012, retiring Tantawi and taking itself out of governing Egypt. Today, it continues in the same pattern. The military was fervently hoping that President Morsi would prove up to the challenge of governing Egypt, precisely so that it would not have to deal with any mess arising from his failure. The statement today can be summed up, perhaps a bit unkindly, as: “We’ve chosen no-one’s side but our own in this mess, and we’re rather annoyed that you (the political elite) could not sort out things on your own.”

Cairo-based journalist Patrick Galey vents:

I believe that if you gave two shits about the poor people who gave their lives for the revolution, who paid the ultimate sacrifice so that Egyptians could be free to choose their own leaders, you wouldn’t try to mitigate or explain away a return to military rule – you’d rage against it.

What I remember, moreover, is the people who were killed, tortured and terrorised under SCAF. I remember the blood and the injustice and the horrible, terrifying lack of accountability that comes with autocratic rule. I remember the police blinding people outside the Interior Ministry, when – forget birdshot and teargas – fucking bullets were felling people. I remember seeing the grainy video, recorded on a cellphone of a Masri fan in Port Said, of an Ahly fan being physically beaten to death as the police stood and watched.

Now some people are carrying the police on their shoulders. I believe that is a betrayal.