Percussion... another thing I've always loved right from when I was a little kid. (I do not know to play any instrument -- just loved the beat of percussion instruments, is all)

First up, a dance to a djembe beat from Bamako, Mali.



Here's some djembe drumming and dancing at a marriage ceremony in Bamako, Mali


and more djembe and dancing from Senegal this time (Mamadou Sidibe on the djembe)


And here is 4-year old Isaiah Chevrier playing the djembe -- I had seen some of his videos on youtube before. The future is in good hands, literally!





Abdoulaye is Isaiah's 2-year old brother


Some day, these kids will be like this Grand Master Djembe Player - 70-year old Sega Cisse.




Related: A travel log about drumming in Bamako, Mali

David Rieff writes about his mother, Susan Sontag, who died of cancer in December 2004 (wow...3+ years! Feels like a couple at most!):

My mother loved science, and believed in it (as she believed in reason) with a fierce, unwavering tenacity bordering on religiosity. There was a sense in which reason was her religion. She was also always a servant of what she admired, and I am certain that her admiration for science (as a child, the life of Madame Curie had been the first of her models) and above all for physicians helped her maintain her conviction -- and again, this, too, was probably an extrapolation from childhood -- that somewhere out there was something better than what was at hand, whether the something in question was a new life or a new medical treatment.

I found the above excerpt in a review of David's book Swimming in a sea of death, in which Thomas Lynch writes:

"Swimming in a Sea of Death" is Rieff's brief record of how high priests of the body and blood sort -- whether oncologists or monsignors -- must so often disappoint. And how they disappointed his mother. In the end, neither science nor medicine, reason nor raw intellect, "avidity" for life nor her lifelong sense that hers was a special case -- nothing could undo her death. Susan Sontag "died as she had lived: unreconciled to mortality." And there is the sadness at the heart of Rieff's testimony: that mothers die, as fathers do, regardless of what they or their children believe or disbelieve. It is our humanity that makes us mortal, not our creeds or their antitheses.

All of us swim in the one sea all our lives, trying to stay afloat as best we can, clinging to such lifelines and preservers as we might draw about us: reason and science, faith and religious practice, art and music and imagination. And in the end, we all go "down, down, down" as Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote, "into the darkness," although she did not approve and was not resigned. Some lie back, float calmly and then succumb, while others flail about furiously and go under all the same. Some work quietly through Elisabeth Kübler-Ross' tidy, too hopeful stages; others "rage, rage" as Dylan Thomas told his father to. But all get to the "dying of the light." Some see death as a transition while others see it as extinction.

(Emphasis mine. Loved that sentence.)

Read the review in its entirety. Well written and kind of timely for me in some ways as my wife and I are dealing with some health issues with our own parents this month.

This video (may be considered NSFW) for a song called 'Sex has made me stupid' is NOT what I had in mind when I blogged earlier about robotic sex! ;)

Great video though. It's UK artist Dave the Chimp's second video for the British electro-punk band, Robots In Disguise. The earlier one is here.

Seems, when the band plays live, they are joined by a drummer named Ann Droid. Maybe its an intentionally assumed pseudonym..... but, that's pretty cool. Ann Droid. Great futuristic name! ;)

No matter how piercing and appalling his insights, the desolation creeping over his outer world, the lurid lights and shadows of his inner world, the writer must live with hope, work in faith." - J.B. Priestley

Found the above at a link that refers to Faulkner's Nobel lecture in 1949. Three short paragraphs but what a punch they deliver! Some day, I will read my Faulkner!

I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work - a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand here where I am standing.

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it c

an be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

After enjoying his son's guitar playing over and over again for more than an hour, I am tempted to go visit Ali Farka Toure's music again. In one of my first posts tagged music here, I had linked to some of his videos at youtube in July 2006 -- I never embedded videos then but they are there towards the end of the post. Go seek them... 7 videos of pure joy!

Here then are a few more gems from the master!

In my previous post, I thought I went to heaven listening to his son play "Ai du". Here is the master himself playing that beautiful piece.



You can also hear him on the recorded version of "Ai Du" with Ry Cooder, in the Grammy-winning album Talking Timbaktu. Also, another song, "Diaraby" also from the same album.


Two great videos with 9+ minutes of great music each, thanks to the comment someone left here. Anonymous...but thanks a lot, my friend.





And finally,
live from the Festival of the Desert in 2003.

I initially wondered whether this was from the evening in Somerville, MA (a few miles from my house!) in 2007. I remember reading about it but did not manage to get there. Not so.. Joe's pub is in NYC. The Somerville event was at Johnny D's in Davis Square.

If there is a God, he must be having a good time listening to Ali Farka Toure. For now, here on earth, THIS is heaven! (Thank you, Thank you, Thank you...to Vieux's bassist Eric Herman's activism-minded Modiba Productions, who produce Vieux's records, for putting this online!)



I cannot imagine how amazing it must be to listen to his father live.... missed that chance now :(... but I HAVE to see Vieux live next time he is in the Boston area! Or maybe I'll just see him whenever I get to the Desert Festival, huh? ;)

And here is Vieux playing "Bullet the Blue Sky" by U2



and one last short clip for now... from the Dun Laoghaire Festival of World Cultures, Ireland in August 2007.



Previous post about Vieux here.

Take note, US performers^.. one can have good ...no...great music too, in addition to a good dance routine!




That's the very beautiful voiced Mali singer, Rokia Traore. Unlike Ali Farka Toure & Toumani Diabate, she is not from a griot but is from the Bamana ethnic group - traditionally not allowed to perform as musicians. Thank god people like her and Salif Keita (also of royal heritage, traced back to the founder of the Mali Empire, Sundiata Keita) have been able to fight these old customs and bring their beautiful voices to the world.

^ Some of them - don't need to name names, do I? - can hardly be called performers. Drugged-out tramps maybe but calling them musicians would be an insult of the musicians of the world! If music is not the priority but shaking you hips and flaunting your body is ...(nothing wrong with latter..but that's not a music video, its called soft-porn at best; and depending on which performer it is - ugliness.) ... then sorry.. that does not qualify as music in my mind. This here....is music!

Thanks to youtube and the internet revolution, here I am...listening to these beautiful voices from around the globe this Saturday morning. Here's more. Beautiful music. Amazing voice.





I had heard Rokia before but another Mali diva that I read about and heard just now is Oumou Sangare. You can listen to her songs through World Circuit but here are a few videos through youtube.

First up - a live performance of Oumou Sangare featuring Ali Farka Toure at the Festival in the Desert in 2003.*



And there is more.... including the first video below where she sings with the very talented Alicia Keyes (one really good US singer, who has a good voice AND has made it big in the US.)





Some of my earlier posts about music from West Africa, in particular Mali: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5..


* Some day before I die I hope to be at the Festival in the desert in Mali! Next time someone says go to Timbaktu, I'll gladly take them up on it ;) (The festival is held in Essakane, approximately 65 kilometers north of the city of Timbuktu.)

In trying to find these links, google came up with links to some travel agents offering packages to the festival. Unbelievable how expensive it is! I guess with popularity comes price!

The 2008 festival just got over (Jan 10-12) but thanks to the Guardian newspaper, some free mp3s from the 2008 event.
Bassekou Kouyate, the ngoni wizard of Mali
Khaira Arby performs
Vieux Farka Touré performs
Tamikrist
Unknown Tuaregs singing around the campfire

Also, you can see pictures & some videos of the 2007 edition of this great festival.

http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/a-longer-spot-check-on-global-warming/


Everyone's Gone Nuts: The exaggerated threat of food allergies

..courtesy, Dailymotion.com! Enjoy, like I did tonight...whilst following the 3rd days play of this exciting cricket match!

Big brain theory, indeed!

It could be the weirdest and most embarrassing prediction in the history of cosmology, if not science.

If true, it would mean that you yourself reading this article are more likely to be some momentary fluctuation in a field of matter and energy out in space than a person with a real past born through billions of years of evolution in an orderly star-spangled cosmos. Your memories and the world you think you see around you are illusions.

Dang.. I knew I was insignificant but a "momentary fluctuation in a field of matter and energy"! :)

There is more oddball speculation in this theory...

The basic problem is that across the eons of time, the standard theories suggest, the universe can recur over and over again in an endless cycle of big bangs, but it’s hard for nature to make a whole universe. It’s much easier to make fragments of one, like planets, yourself maybe in a spacesuit or even — in the most absurd and troubling example — a naked brain floating in space. Nature tends to do what is easiest, from the standpoint of energy and probability. And so these fragments — in particular the brains — would appear far more frequently than real full-fledged universes, or than us. Or they might be us.

Read the details at the article, if interested. Makes for some fascinating sci-fi-ish leaps of imagination for sure but who said life is simple. Jokes aside, even Einstein's relativity theories sound sci-fi-ish to me and those are pretty well proven! These theories are still evolving and could well be proven wrong by someone else down the road or maybe we are really fluctuations!

Elmore Leonard has advice for writers.. no point excerpting anything - just go read it.

I found it at a post by Amit Varma, who found it at a post at Prufocks page. Amit had also blogged earlier (I thought I had too but cannot find the post!) about VS Naipaul’s Advice To Writers and Eight Rules For Writing Fiction by Kurt Vonnegut.

Also: Top 10 bookshops from around the world, from the Guardian; also via Prufocks page.

My question is doesn't wealth bring you better access to good health care and education. Aren't these confounded effects? Interactions, anyone!

A study pulled together from sources and surveys found that good health care and education are as important as wealth to modern happiness

A mere 20 people in the experiment but interesting results nonetheless, supported by MRI mapping of the reactions in the brain. (Amazing that a prestigious journal like Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences will accept a study with 20 people. Statistically its hardly enough to give you separation of the means.)

Apparently, raising the price really does make the wine taste better.

At least that seems to be the result of a taste test. The part of the brain that reacts to a pleasant experience responded more strongly to pricey wines than cheap ones — even when tasters were given the same vintage in disguise.

Antonio Rangel and colleagues at California Institute of Technology thought the perception that higher price means higher quality could influence people, so they decided to test the idea.

They asked 20 people to sample wine while undergoing functional MRIs of their brain activity. The subjects were told they were tasting five different Cabernet Sauvignons sold at different prices.

However, there were actually only three wines sampled, two being offered twice, marked with different prices. A $90 wine was provided marked with its real price and again marked $10, while another was presented at its real price of $5 and also marked $45.

The testers' brains showed more pleasure at the higher price than the lower one, even for the same wine, Rangel reports in this week's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

He added that wine professionals would probably be able to differentiate the better wine — "one would hope."

"Our results suggest that the brain might compute experienced pleasantness in a much more sophisticated manner that involves integrating the actual sensory properties of the substance being consumed with the expectations about how good it should be," the researchers reported.

Next step: pain.

Rangel wants to see if people perceive pain differently, depending on their expectations. He hopes to administer mild electric shocks to subjects and measure their reaction when told a shock was going to be stronger or weaker. "We are trying to understand how the brain encodes experiences and what variables can manipulate this," he said. "It helps us understand what it means to be human."

Been seeing a few different TED talks tonight... this one by neuroscientist, Vilayanur Ramachandran (VR) is fascinating.

(It) explores how brain damage can reveal the connection between the internal structures of the brain and the corresponding functions of the mind. He talks about phantom limb pain, synesthesia (when people hear color or smell sounds), and the Capgras delusion, when brain-damaged people believe their closest friends and family have been replaced with imposters.

I had previously blogged about VR's research, which I had learned about while watching Secrets of the Mind, an episode of PBS's great science program Nova.

The new thinking about compassion from social neuroscience is that our default wiring is to help...

Nancy Friedman blogged in October 2006 about

http://nancyfriedman.typepad.com/away_with_words/2006/10/word_of_the_wee_1.html

Word of the Week: Pizzled

Pizzled: A combination of "puzzled" and "pissed off." Coined by psychiatrist Edward Hallowell in his book CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap! Strategies for Coping in a World Gone ADD (whew!) to describe how you feel "when you're eating with somebody and their phone rings and they answer it." Evidently he hadn't researched the traditional meaning of "pizzle," which has been around since 1523.

Great talk by Chilean author Isabel Allende at TED....added January 09, 2008

hilarious, witty, intelligent, sad, ..... full of life. love wit passion humor ..



Many ...

An interesting article in NYT today on the Moral Instinct by Steven Pinker, whose many erudite books continue to remain on my to-read list! In fact, I saw at the book store today that he has a new book in 2007 - The Stuff of Thought. So, that makes it 5 books by Pinker that I need to read some day!*

Anyways, in today's NYT article, Pinker asks: Who's the most admirable person? Mother Teresa, Bill Gates, or Norman Borlaug.

Norman who, you ask? That was my reaction too! Norman Borlaug is the most admirable, says Pinker...for he is the "father of the “Green Revolution” that used agricultural science to reduce world hunger, (and) has been credited with saving a billion lives, more than anyone else in history."

But, as Pinker explains, we are..

... turned by an aura of sanctity, distracting us from a more objective reckoning of the actions that make people suffer or flourish. It seems we may all be vulnerable to moral illusions the ethical equivalent of the bending lines that trick the eye on cereal boxes and in psychology textbooks.

And so it is Teresa and then maybe Gates (not the Microsoft CEO Gates, who people hate but the philanthropic Gates, who through his foundation is working towards "bringing innovations in health and learning to the global community") who come to mind as good people who have done or are doing a lot for mankind whereas...

...Borlaug, now 93, is an agronomist who has spent his life in labs and nonprofits, seldom walking onto the media stage, and hence into our consciousness, at all.

Borlaug is one of five people in history to have won the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Congressional Gold Medal. Shameful that I had never even heard his name before today!

Anyways, go read the article in its entirety. Fascinating stuff.

* Update: Realized I had mentioned his latest book in an earlier post...but this was when he was still writing it and the book was not published. However, worth repeating here is the link I had then provided to a talk by Pinker at the TED conference in 2005, in which he previewed his soon to be released book. The book looks at language, and the way it expresses the workings of our minds. He questions the very nature of our thoughts -- the way we use words, how we learn, and how we relate to others.

I have read only one Haruki Murakami's novel - Sputnik Sweetheart - and none of his other famous ones (1, 2, 3). However, recently I quite enjoyed his short stories in After the quake, although I read only about half the stories before I had to return the book to the library. I knew he had another collection of short stories in the 1990s -The Elephant Vanishes - but did not know till this evening* that a third collection of stories was translated to English and published late last year - Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, a collection of 24 short stories that per this reviewer at amazon.com are...

.... "quintessentially Murakami: understated tales of love, longing, and loss from the slightly eccentric to the downright surreal--and yet so surreal as to ring true, convincingly grasping life's little mysteries and synchronicities in a deadpan, matter-of-fact manner. Genres blend and identities blur, reality and illusion overlap and interplay, all amidst the familiar psychological furniture of our contemporary consumerist planet with its internationally hodgepodge culture. The occasional dash of postmodern irony only accentuates these unsettling explorations of the human condition, and yet for all that each tale is enjoyable and highly entertaining to read. Almost deceptively so."

Sounds deliciously appealing. Will have to check it out! (In fact, he also has another novel in 2007 - After Dark. Hmm...prolific AND good. An not-so-common occurrence.)

* I spent about an hour and a half in a book-store today and was overwhelmed by how many good books - new and old - there are to read. There were hundreds of authors and books but four authors whose work I have enjoyed in the past spring to mind. Perusing through the books, I realized that Coetzee has a new book (Dairy of a bad year), Gordimer has a new collection of short stories (Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black: And Other Stories), Phillip Roth has another book (Exit Ghost), and McEwan had a new one last year which is on my to-read list (On Chesil Beach), not to mention older books by all four authors that I still have to read.

Phew...so much to read, so little time. And considering there is so much to read of what other people do, when will *I* do something? Phew...so much to read, so little time. And considering there is so much to read of what other people do, when will *I* do something? Should I even try to write something...there are thousands and thousands of books published already --- so much time and effort probably went into it.... what good will it do if somehow I even write something worthy of being published! Not that I even know if I can write! Have written nothing - not even a nice review, let alone a short story or an article, to date!

Phew...enough with this blogging and surfing, advise some... but if only I had the discipline! My average for the month was typically 25-35 posts in 2007, until I hit a record high of 73 in December. January is following the same trend! 42 posts in 12 days of January, 10 just today! What a waste of my time though, especially since hardly anyone even reads my blog! What am I writing this for? For posterity? What will I think about all this time 10 years from now? Wasted time? Invested time?

Actually, last night I read an interesting post by the Great Bong (he won the Best Indian Blog award in 2006; following Amit Varma's win of the inaugural award in 2005), where he has an interesting conversation (imagined of course) on his 30th birthday with his 20-year old self. So, what would a 45 year old me think of the time spent online blogging and surfing through the 30s? What does this 30-something me think of all the time spent/invested in various activities in my 20s? Did something concrete come out of it all? Is there any kind of lasting legacy? Does it matter? Especially, if I enjoyed it at the time... despite a nagging feeling that I was not doing all that I could be doing and becoming all that I could be.

And what is it I want to be anyways? And what good are all these questions, if I have no answers and even if I have answers, I do not act on them? And where do these questions come from? Is mid-30s the time for an existential mid-life crisis?

Ok.. enough rambling. It is almost 9pm this Saturday evening and I am going to go read one of the many books I have checked out from the library. Stop blogging for now! At least for tonight before I succumb to temptation again tomorrow morning! (Hope its not again later tonight!) Who was that guy who said: Internet, thy name is temptation! ;)

P.S. Haah! An idea just struck me. Maybe 350-400 years from today, they'll glorify my ruminations and collection as a treasure-trove of information! Just like Pepys. :)

Love-Lines An exploration of human desires, using words and pictures.

We Feel Fine: An exploration of human emotion, in six movements.

Both websites are the work of Jonathan Harris, who in his work combines "elements of computer science, anthropology, visual art, and storytelling to design systems to explore and explain the human world."

-
Exploration is really the essence of the human spirit. - Frank Borman

Two snippets of news from the Good magazine that tell you how interconnected we all have become ...how flat the world is! Anyone thinking of such ideas 15-20 years back would be thought of as a kook! ;)

The helpdesk's long been outsourced, medical insurance paperwork, financial analysis and tutoring for kids have been outsourced....even surrogate motherhood has been outsourced... so why not singing telegrams! :)

A singing telegram from India, delivered via phone call. Just pick a song and TajTunes will give your friend/enemy/special someone a call and sing to them. They have a few songs to choose from, including a Happy Birthday song, a Congratulations song and one just to say "What's Up?" They're only $5; we're already looking forward to a long, fruitful relationship with this service.

Though there is one 'outsourcing' idea the Dutch thought of before someone outsource it to India :)

You can pay a Dutch company to spray paint messages on the Palestinian side of the infamous wall. It costs 30 Euro, but it's a helluva lot more memorable than a post-it. It's a rebellious sort of interconnectivity.

Hmmm.. what other great idea can you think of to outsource?

Nancy Griffin writes in the AARP magazine*

You heard it here first: 2008 is the year that will forever change the image of 50. Consider the bumper crop of rock stars and sex symbols who will hit the half-century mark—including Sharon Stone, Madonna, Viggo Mortensen, Ellen DeGeneres, Prince, and Michelle Pfeiffer, just to name a few.

Does that mean 50 is the new 30? Not really. Most of us, at 50 and beyond, are happy with the lines we’ve earned and the lives we’ve led. Still, nobody can deny that being a quinquagenarian today is a whole new ball game. Fifty can mean starting a brand-new career or soaring to new heights in an old one (before Lord of the Rings, few would have recognized the accomplished indie actor Viggo Mortensen). It can mean having young children (Stone has three kids under age seven). Or it can mean the freedom and confidence to do whatever the heck you want—whether it’s to spend time with family, write children’s books, take to the stage in a corset, or, like Madonna, do all three.

So in honor of AARP’s 50th anniversary we hereby proclaim: “50 is the new 50.”

* Don't ask me why I am reading an article for retired people (AARP) - its just one of he wonders of the internet and my desultory mind. :) Actually, I happened to land there somehow after reading Garrison Keillor's Writers Almanac for Jan 9th, which tells us that Krantz, "was a fashion editor for Good Housekeeping magazine, then a freelance journalist. It wasn't until she was 51, and her children were grown, that she wrote her first book. She began working on a novel, writing six and a half hours a day, five days a week. After nine months, her book, Scruples, was completed. It was published in March of 1978. Four months later it became number one on The New York Times best-seller list and remained there for almost one year."

Judith Tarcher Krantz said at her 40th Reunion at Wellesley some years back:

"Just in time for my 50th birthday, I discovered that I could write fiction. My husband had urged me to try fiction for 15 years before I did. . . . I believed that if I couldn't write 'literature,' I shouldn't write at all. . . . Now, I would say to young women, do something you have a true feeling for, no matter how little talent you may believe you have. Let no masterwork be your goal—a modest goal may lead you further than you dream."

Those words are inspiring to me, though I am not a "young woman"....but will I act?

David Foster Wallace's short story "Good Old Neon" (from his book of short stories, Oblivion) begins:

"My whole life I've been a fraud. I'm not exaggerating. Pretty much all I've ever done all the time is try to create a certain impression of me in other people. Mostly to be liked or admired. It's a little more complicated than that, maybe. But when you come right down to it it's to be liked, loved. Admired, approved of, applauded, whatever. You get the idea."

Beautiful lines, excerpted from Argentinian writer, Marcela Sola's novel, El Silencio de Kind (Kind's Silence), which is included in Words without borders - The world through the eyes of writers.

The world cannot be seen. A glance does not necessarily mean the truth. The world came to me through imagination, a certain internal touch, large fingers that reach from inside, that brush across the surface of things, people, and colors, feeling their inner workings, without ever looking at them, those things and people that are so desired, so distant, so inaccessible. You can be blind and mute but not deaf. Blind, one cannot capture the meaning of words, what humans exchange through them, how they complete and embroider them. What bodies scream at the top of their voices, what glances say, the brume emitted by words. That world that never manages to be complete.

and later..

Experience is different: sealed inside a glass ball you can perceive everything that was ever spoken, everything that words don't say, for the same reason that you never hear them. Beneath the outer layers of human skin, there are underground streams that run through us, imperceptible, delicate strings like those of a spiderweb that unite more inexorably than voices and oaths...

It is actually a very beautiful story... the above excerpts giving nothing away about it. What a treasure this collection of translations is -- we would never read these gems otherwise!

Walter Benjamin: "I learned to wrap myself in words that were, in fact, clouds."

"..on ordinary days that we didn't know
until we looked back across a distance
of forty years would glow and shimmer
in memory's flickering light. "
- from "After School on Ordinary Days" by Maria Mazziotti Gillan, from Italian Women In Black Dresses.
http://www.publicradio.org/tools/media/player/almanac/2008/01/08_wa

"I have only one reader — me. I'm the average reader. If I like it, that's all I worry about." - Judith Krantz

This is why I love to read (and I also love movies for the same reason) books much more than following politics or sports (even cricket!):

..to go more deeply into the experience of the other -- no matter how "foreign" -- is to go more deeply into our own experience as well. Leo Tolstoy wrote: "Art is transferring feeling from one heart to another." .......

This is from the Introduction by Andre Dubus III to the book "Words without borders - The world through the eyes of writers". The post title also is from the same paragraph...as a trait that, Dubus writes, each story in the collection has.

The collection is a truly wonderful one and expect more excerpts from the various short pieces in thebook in the days to come. (Some time this year, I also need to find wordswithoutborders's other book on Literature from the "Axis of Evil", in which the editor, Alane Mason writes in the introduction, "Not knowing what the rest of the world is thinking and writing is both dangerous and boring."

Premise of a new book by David Levy, Love and Sex with Robots

“The first half sets out to prove that human beings can indeed love robots, and the second, spicier, section is given over to showing that we will, and in fact already do, have sex with robots.” - via Boldtype

And why not...they're already fantasizing about a virtual woman, obsessing over pillows, falling in love with dolls (there's a word for it - agalmatophilia!), then why not a mechanized one! This one is even better because plausibly the robot gets some joy out of the fingering..er...feeling too!*

Just beware of a Pygmalion twist to the tale -- she may say: "If you really love me, you'd bring me to life." And that, as the scientists who want to be God would agree is yet not in the hands of humans. Not yet, at least!

On a more serious note, I do NOT want to live in this new world but it is fascinating stuff, nonetheless. I am not going to be a nay-sayer and say this won't happen either. Nothing against the tech-savvy Japanese but expect this dehumanization to happen first in the nation that thought of the digital pet, followed quickly by the country that brought us the Furby, and to be adopted quickly by people who get a kick living their lives in Second Life!

Like a reviewer of David Levy's book writes at amazon.com: "The lost self thus luxuriates in a technopology of polymorphic perversity." (Say what again!)


Related Links:
NY Times review
Fox News report
LA Times review
MSNBC report
Wired feature

Related books: The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence by Ray Kurzweil and The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology also by Ray Kurzweil

And lastly, if this is your kind of thing, you may also enjoy reading Warren Ellis's Second Life sketches. Like me, even if you are not a fan of these 'role playing' games people play... go read the sketches. If nothing else, its good for shock value of where the world is going + Ellis, author of futuristic graphic novels like Transmetropolitan does write well.)

Also see an old post of mine about 'ambient intimacy'.


* Two snippets from last year come to mind.

NRI scientists help robots feel

Today's robots can understand human speech, but are unable to feel human touch. But all that may be a thing of the past with two Indian-born scientists at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln having developed what they claim is a small film that can mimic the sensitivity of a human finger. This they say will become useful in the next generation of robots and in automated tools used for microsurgery.

Emotion robots learn from people
Making robots that interact with people emotionally is the goal of a European project led by British scientists. Co-ordinator Dr Lola Canamero said the aim was to build robots that "learn from humans and respond in a socially and emotionally appropriate manner".

I guess the goal of the second study may be easier to achieve than trying to get humans to respond to each other in a "socially and emotionally appropriate manner"!

The prostitute has come to symbolize for me the ultimate liberated woman, who lives on the edge and whose sexuality belongs to no one. - Camille Paglia

French actress Catherine Deneuve, who made her international reputation in Belle de Jour,
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_20070413/ai_n19015314

Man spots his wife during visit to brothel

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22571847/

An old quote perhaps but new to me:

Serial or sex murder, like fetishism, is a perversion of male intelligence. It is a criminal abstraction, masculine in its deranged egotism and orderliness. It is the asocial equivalent of philosophy, mathematics, and music. There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper. - Camille Paglia

The above and other quotes by Paglia can be found here.

I was trying to find a good coffee table book - likely going to be something related to travel (i.e. something with wonderful pictures from around the globe) - but in doing the search, I ran into a couple interesting links.

The latter had this interesting book in their list..

Unmentionables: A Brief History of Underwear by Elaine Benson and John Esten (Simon & Schuster) dives right to the heart of the matter with the book flap: "Garters. Bras. Briefs. Corselettes. Underpants. We know what these sexy items are, but how much do we really know about them?" How much do you want to know? This book takes you from strategically placed fig leafs on Adam and Eve to "fetishistic paraphernalia, intrinsic elements of sadomasochistic fantasy."

Apparently, "this thoroughly illustrated volume covers all, from the first fig leaf to the newest Fruit of the Looms and from bloomers to panties, revealing a side of humanity not often seen in public."

Or as Judith Newman wrote in the NYT more than a decade back when the book was first published in 1996:

Smart and sprightly, the lavishly illustrated UNMENTIONABLES is a literary rummage through lingerie drawers past and present.

A literary rummage through lingerie drawers. Nicely put! :)

Related books: How Underwear Got Under There by Kathy Shaskan & Regan Dunnick and Inside Out: A Brief History of Underwear by Shelley Tobin.

(I really should have a tag called 'Books'. This is NOT Literature!)

Unlocking the Benefits of Garlic

'Generation Next' in the Slow Lane to Adulthood

Six Techniques to Get More from the Web than Google Will Tell You

Kosher cell phones!!

Unlocking the Benefits of Garlic

Super-Repellent Plastic

With GE's new plastic, self-washing buildings, cheap diagnostic chips, and free-flowing honey jars are possible.

23/02/2006

GE Finds Its Inner Edison
10/01/2003

Plastic under Pressure
04/01/2004

Why Big Companies Can't Invent
05/01/2004

I had seen the book On Bullshit by Harry Frankfurt couple years ago when it was first published but had not read it. Today, while at the public library, I saw that the author has a new book, On Truth.

I have picked up both books -- both are small (four by six inches) and short (~ 65 and 100 pages, respectively) and hope to read both this month.

This excerpt from a short review of On Bullshit should convey the essence of what the author has to say about the omni-present bullshitting* we have to endure in our lives.

"One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. ... In consequence, we have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves. And we lack a conscientiously developed appreciation of what it means to us. In other words, we have no theory." (p. 1)

In Frankfurt's analysis, "bullshit" is speech whose truth the speaker considers unimportant; that is, the speaker does not care if he or she is lying or telling the truth, only whether the statement advances a particular objective. In Frankfurt's view this is worse than lying, as liars consider the truth to be important even as they avoid it.

* Like Laura Penny, author of Your Call Is Important to Us: The Truth About Bullshit observed: "We live in an era of unprecedented bullshit production."

More...through Frankfurt's words, excerpted from the book itself:

It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth—this indifference to how things really are—that I regard as the essence of bullshit.

...

Both in lying and in telling the truth people are guided by their beliefs concerning the way things are. These guide them as they endeavor either to describe the world correctly or to describe it deceitfully. For this reason, telling lies does not tend to unfit a person for telling the truth in the same way that bullshitting tends to. ...The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.

To quote Frankfurt again, this time from the Introduction to his recent book, On Truth: "Bullshitting constitutes a more insidious threat than lying does to the conduct of civilized life." (After his nice expostulation of how bullshitting works, why it is omni-present in today's world, and its insidiousness, he elucidates in this recent book on what makes truth so important.)

Timothy Noah at Slate in a review of On Bullshit explains further:

Frankfurt's conclusion [..] is that bullshit is defined not so much by the end product as by the process by which it is created. Bullshit, Frankfurt notes, is an inevitable byproduct of public life, "where people are frequently impelled—whether by their own propensities or by the demands of others—to speak extensively about matters of which they are to some degree ignorant."

Noah goes on to discuss this in the context of the bullshit on television (Faux News is the leader but they are all guilty at some level or other!) and also that put forth by the Bush administration on a regular basis.

Cable television and the Internet have created an unending demand for information, and there simply isn't enough truth to go around. So, we get bullshit instead. Indeed, there are some troubling signs that the consumer has come to prefer bullshit. In choosing guests to appear on cable news, bookers will almost always choose a glib ignoramus over an expert who can't talk in clipped sentences.

The Bush administration is clearly more bullshit-heavy than its predecessors. Slate's founding editor, Michael Kinsley, put his finger on the Bush administration's particular style of lying three years ago:

If the truth was too precious to waste on politics for Bush I and a challenge to overcome for Clinton, for our current George Bush it is simply boring and uncool. Bush II administration lies are often so laughably obvious that you wonder why they bother. Until you realize: They haven't bothered.

But by Frankfurt's lights, what Bush does isn't lying at all. It's bullshitting. Whatever you choose to call it, Bush's indifference to the truth is indeed more troubling, in many ways, than what Frankfurt calls "lying" would be. Richard Nixon knew he was bombing Cambodia. Does George W. Bush have a clue that his Social Security arithmetic fails to add up? How can he know if he doesn't care?

Indeed!! Assaulted by bullshitters every day in all spheres of life, aren't we?


Note:

1. According to wikipedia, the essay was originally published in the journal Raritan in 1986 before being published as a book in 2005. Actually, I find that wikipedia has a link under References to the entire text of the essay!

2. I changed the post title after reading this sentence from the aforementioned review by Timoth Noah

How does bullshit differ from such precursors as humbug, poppycock, tommyrot, hooey, twaddle, balderdash, claptrap, palaver, hogwash, buncombe (or "bunk"), hokum, drivel, flapdoodle, bullpucky, and all the other pejoratives favored by H.L. Mencken and his many imitators?

A few articles from Technology Review that spotlight some of the great research reported in 2007.

1. The Genetics of Language Researchers are beginning to crack the code that gives humans our unique way with words.

2. Carbon-Dioxide Plastic Gets Funding A startup is moving ahead with an efficient method to make biodegradable plastic.

3. The Longevity Pill? Drugs much more powerful than the resveratrol found in red wine will be tested to treat diabetes.

4. The New Hygiene Hypothesis The microbes within us could explain rising allergy rates.

5. Brain Circuitry, Alight Neurons in 100 hues spotlight disease, development.

6. E-Paper, In Living Color Materials advances could bring color, video, and flexibility.

7. IBM Attempts to Reinvent Memory A new type of memory using nanowires could be simpler, cheaper, denser, faster, and more reliable.

8. Extending Moore's Law A faster, more energy-efficient chip by packing in more transistors--without shrinking them. (Also read: Moore’s Law Hangs on – Dec 2007)

9. The Ultrafast Future of Wireless A new metal film could help control terahertz radiation and lead to wireless devices that are thousands of times faster than today's Wi-Fi.

10. A Cheaper Route to Speeding Up the Web A new silicon-based optical device has the potential to improve the speed, cost, and reach of fiber-optic networks.

11. Printing Cheap Chips Kovio's system for printing inorganic transistors could lead to large-area displays and cheap smart cards. (Related: Plastic Electronics Head for Market)

12. Graphene Transistors Electronics made of a single sheet of carbon could be created much smaller than those made with silicon.

And lets make it a baker’s dozen with another interesting application of graphene

13. Ultrastrong Paper from Graphene A new paperlike material could lead to novel types of light and flexible materials.

More about who Guha is and a link to his essays at Outlook (subscription needed).

Also a profile of History's Footman by Anita Nair.

books of the year: http://www.readysteadybook.com/Blog.aspx?permalink=20071222110453 and http://www.readysteadybook.com/BOTY.aspx?page=boty2007

Chandrahas's " informal four-part series on India to mark the 60th anniversary of Indian independence."
http://middlestage.blogspot.com/2007/07/jawaharlal-nehru-as-writer-of-english.html
http://middlestage.blogspot.com/2007/07/on-rajmohan-gandhis-biography-of.html
http://middlestage.blogspot.com/2007/08/art-of-oratory-and-great-speeches-of.html
http://middlestage.blogspot.com/2007/08/mark-tully-and-india.html

One of the books on India that was highlighted in my previous post was Ramachandra Guha’s India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy.

I have not read anything to date by Ramachandra Guha, though I find that he has written quite a few good books on topics that are of interest to me -- Indian history, many books on environmentalism, and has even written and edited books on cricket!

In a recent article in Outlook, Guha compares the triumvirate of Salman Rushdie, Amartya Sen and VS Naipaul to the Hindu holy trinity of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva:

"Analagous to Brahma, Vishnu, and Siva, we have Salman the Creator, Amartya the Preserver, and Sir Vidia the Destroyer. Just as Brahma gave birth to the world, Rushdie gave birth, through his magnificent novel Midnight's Children, to an innovative and globally influential school of Indian writing in English. Like the god he resembles he appears to have done little since—but, for that first and fundamental act of creation, we worship him still.

Vishnu the Preserver is supposed to have had 10 avatars. His successor probably exceeds him in this regard. Sometimes he comes to us as a Bangladeshi (by virtue of the fact that he was born in Dhaka), at other times as a Bengali, at still other times as a Global Indian. Other roles he has assumed include economist, philosopher, sociologist, historian, and seer. Like the god he resembles he comes to cheer us, to console us, to chastise us.

Siva could set the world ablaze with a mere blink of the eyelids. His modern successor can destroy a reputation by a word or two said (or unsaid). As with Siva, we fear Sir Vidia, we propitiate him, and we worship him. Who knows, if we are diligent and devoted enough, he may grant us some favours in this world (or the next)."

Beautiful stuff. :)

Note: I found the above excerpt at a post by Hari Jagannathan Balasubramanian, who blogs at the creatively titled blog - Thirty letters in my name. This was my first time at this blog, landing there via a post at India Uncut. The IU post was in itself an interesting history lesson about our biases and prejudices but that’s a topic for another time. For now, you can go read Hari’s post and also Amit’s related article about the ‘Expanding Circle’ for further details.