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From ABC News:

The killers showed no mercy: They didn’t spare women and children, or even a 4-day-old baby, from their machetes. On Monday, Nigerian women wailed in the streets as a dump truck carried dozens of bodies past burned-out homes toward a mass grave.

Rubber-gloved workers pulled ever-smaller bodies from the dump truck and tossed them into the mass grave. A crowd began singing a hymn with the refrain, “Jesus said I am the way to heaven.” As the grave filled, the grieving crowd sang: “Jesus, show me the way.”

At least 200 people, most of them Christians, were slaughtered on Sunday, according to residents, aid groups and journalists. The local government gave a figure more than twice that amount, but offered no casualty list or other information to substantiate it.

An Associated Press reporter counted 61 corpses, 32 of them children, being buried in the mass grave in the village of Dogo Nahawa on Monday. Other victims would be buried elsewhere. At a local morgue the bodies of children, including a diaper-clad toddler, were tangled together. One appeared to have been scalped. Others had severed hands and feet.

Religious violence is not a new thing. Some of the most enduring images I have from my Jewish education are descriptions of the violence that has been perpetrated for centuries against Jews by Romans, Greeks, Christians and, though perhaps less often, Muslims. One subtext of those lessons was that the Jews, because we were so steadfast in our religious beliefs, because we refused to assimilate, have been made to suffer religious persecution more than any other group; and, indeed, when I was younger, I often experienced real cognitive dissonance when I heard about religious violence that did not involve Jews. Over time, as my vision of the world and my place in it widened, that dissonance disappeared. I came to understand as well that religion was sometimes merely the justifying veneer that one group would place over the violence they wanted to do to another, a way of hiding their more political and material motivation.

The more I heard and read about religious violence, the more familiar the scripting of it became–and it is remarkable how similar the scripts are; how carefully scripted the incitements to violence are, if not the violence itself, regardless of the religious denominations involved–and, eventually, the stories I would hear left me feeling more numb than anything else. Yes, it was horrible that people were killed, but, I would think, as long as religion contained within it the possibility for someone to decide that he or she is following the one true path and that all those not on that path are morally and spiritually inferior and therefore suspect, then the potential for religious violence inhered in religion, and there was no escaping it.

I continue to believe that, I suppose, which is why I tend not to write about religious violence as such: I just don’t think there is all that much to say, or, rather, that I have much to say that would be useful. Still, this story, which has also been reported on Yahoo! News and other news outlets–the New York Times puts the death toll at 500–brought me up short. In part, this is because I have a very close friend from Nigeria, and she has talked often about the tension between Muslims and Christians in her country. Indeed, this massacre is said to have been retaliation for a similar slaughter of Muslims perpetrated by Christians some time ago, and I can even imagine, from the way in which she talks about it, that my friend might have been among those Muslim-killing Christians had she been in the country and the circumstances been “right.” I feel, in other words, a personal connection to this story that I have rarely felt, not least because my friend might have been among those killed whether or not she had participated in the prior massacre.

I did not know about how deeply my friend’s fear, mistrust, and hatred of the Muslims in Nigeria ran until after our friendship was well-established. She says she feels this way only about Nigerian Muslims, not about people who follow Islam in general, and I believe her, and she tells stories about her own experiences in Nigeria and the experiences of the people she knows to justify herself. The fact that she makes this distinction, of course, suggests that the issues at stake are not really religious, but the fact that they are expressed religiously–in terms of spirituality and morality and the one true path to God–makes it hard, even just between the two of us, to get at what those stakes really are; and then I think about the way our invasion of Iraq and ousting of Saddam Hussein made space for the Sunni and Shia to go at each other’s throats–check out this NPR interview with Deborah Amos about her new book, Eclipse of the Sunnis: Power, Exile, and Upheaval in the Middle East–and even the Israeli-Palestinian struggle over the status of Jerusalem, which is so often played out in religious terms. And when I think about how may more examples I could list, I cannot help but feel that maybe it’s all, always, political; maybe the god or gods all these people fight over is just a way of not having to take responsibility for their own politics, their own desire for power, their own inability to share, their own fear of everything that makes them vulnerable; maybe the need to make your religion the only true one is nothing more than fear and cowardice, and we all know how thin the line is between the coward who cowers and the coward who becomes a bully.

It has been a very long time, since I was an undergraduate in fact, that I have known personally someone who could place her or himself so easily, so firmly, so absolutely, on one side of this kind of divide and so thoroughly forget that the other side is also inhabited by people; and yet even as I write that, it would be dishonest of me not to own up to the fact that I too once stood with Israel, as a Jew, in strictly religious terms, in a way that denied the humanity of the other side.

That we all have this capacity within us is by now a cliche, but how do you learn to accept that impulse in someone who has become your friend? Because if you cannot accept it–which is not the same thing as approving of it, or allowing it to go unchallenged–then there can no longer be a real friendship. This is the question that I am confronting.

Cross-posted on It’s All Connected.

Some things I’ve been reading when I should’ve been grading papers or doing other work:

• A Tough Patron and an Old Ideology Give Women a Lift in Bulgarian Politics, by Dan Bilefsky, The New York Times: What’s most interesting in this article about how Bulgarian Prime Minister Boiko M. Borisov has been appointing women to political offices are the explanations people give for why he is doing so and why women are needed in politics. Boiko says, for example, “Women are more diligent than men, and they don’t take long lunches or got to the bar,” and also, “Women have stronger characters than men because when they say no they mean no, and they are less corruptible.” Others suggest that women are less corruptible because they have more to lose, and others talk about the fact that while Bulgaria “never had a feminist movement” but that during “Communism women in Bulgaria were represented in almost every walk of life, from plant managers to medicine.”
• An interesting piece in The Lede about the politics behind Iran’s capture and the televised confession of Abdolmalek Rigi, leader of Jundallah, a militant group that claims to be defending Sunni Muslims in Iran’s southeast and has killed hundreds of Iranian soldiers and civilians since 2003. For some related articles in the news try here, here and here.
• In I Was the One Reading Andrew Marvell. You Were . . ., also in the Times, Alan Feuer turns some of the “Missed Connections” postings on newyork.craigslist.org into found poems.
• I appreciated “Thoughts on the ‘hookup culture,’ or what I learned from my high school diary, a guest post on Feministe by Nona Willis Aronowitz. One of my favorite bits: “We need to admit as a culture that teens are sexual beings, and that more often than not, sexual maturity has a completely different timeline than emotional maturity.”
• Before I became a translator, I was working on what might have become a book exploring male heterosexuality and pornography, of course, was one of the things I was researching. At the time, I was very disappointed at the narrowness and often impoverished nature of the discourse I found not only about the representation of men in heterosexual video pornography (which was what I was looking at) but also in pornography that was touted as progressive and even feminist. Perhaps one day I will return to that project, but in the mean time I have been enjoying Male Submission Art, the mission of which is to “showcase beautiful imagery where men and other male-identified people are submissive subjects. We aim to challenge stereotypes of the ‘pathetic’ submissive man.” The images are often very cool, and what I like about the analysis is that its core tenet seems to be that for a man to “submit” (whatever that word might mean in any given context) is not, by definition, for him to unman himself or to be unmanned by the one he is submitting to (whatever to “unman” might mean in any given context). Leaving aside the question of whether the particular sexuality expressed by the site is one’s cup of tea or not, it is–for me, anyway–a new, interesting and interestingly subversive way of trying to transform what we mean when we say the words “manhood” or “masculinity.”
• It’s odd, and maybe a bit arrogant sounding, to include something that I’ve written in this list, but I’ve recently been putting together my application for promotion to full professor, which involved going through the two books of translations that I’ve published. As I did so, I was reminded of how wonderful a poet Saadi was. (One of these days I have to add my work to the Wikipdedia entry on him.) So these words may be mine, but they are someone else’s work. It’s from Selections from Saadi’s Gulistan:

The best thing for an ignorant man is to be silent, and if he understands that, and practices it, he will no longer be ignorant.

If the learning you possess is less than perfect,
keep your tongue tucked safely in your mouth.
Empty words disgrace the one who speaks them,
like serving a walnut shell without a nut.
A fool was trying hard to teach his ass
to talk. A wise man watching him observed,
“Aren’t you afraid of what they’ll say
when they find out what you’re doing? This beast
will never learn the trick of human speech.
Better you should learn the gift of silence.”
A man who does not think before he speaks
will almost always use the words foolishly.
If you will not take the time a wise man takes
to speak wisely, practice an animal’s silence.

• The Year of the Drone: A blog with an interactive map and analysis of US drone attacks in Pakistan.
• Ethics and Aesthetics: An brief, interesting post by Malachi Black on The Best American Poetry.

I have a three or four sets of technical writing papers to grade this weekend–I am teaching two sections this semester–and I was thinking to get started tonight, but I can’t bear the thought right now of having to deal with student writing so I am going to procrastinate by telling you briefly about a discussion I had Monday with the section that is all male (the other is mostly male) about the assignment they will be handing in to me next week. I am using a textbook called Elements of Technical Writing, by Thomas Pearsall, the first seven chapters of which deal with the technical writing process. Each chapter is given over to one step in that process, and Pearsall has built an incremental assignment into the sequence of chapters: Students are to imagine that they work for a start-up company that is thinking about investing in groupware so that employees can work remotely. They have been asked by their supervisor to do some research and write a report on groupware that she can use to persuade management to spend the money. The first two steps in the writing process that Pearsall lays out involve putting together a work plan, a description of the project and a list of the tasks that need to be completed. On Monday, we were talking about the audience analysis section of the work plan, and I was asking my students to list what they knew about their supervisor that might be relevant to how they would choose to write their report. They called out some obvious things about being a manager, and then someone said, “She’s a woman.”

“Is that relevant to the writing of your report?” I asked.

“Of course,” someone else answered.

“Why?” I asked, and the answers came very quickly.

“Because women are more skeptical than men.”

“Because women over analyze everything”

“They pay too much attention to details.”

“Women ask too many questions.”

“Because women never forget when you make a mistake.”

“Because women in the workplace always feel they have something to prove; she’s probably going to be really pushy.”

There were a couple of more that I don’t remember clearly, but all of them–with the exception perhaps of the last one–were such unambiguous instances of sexist stereotyping that I was, for a moment, shocked into silence. It had been a very long since I’d heard anyone anywhere assert those stereotypes as if they were simple fact. “Do you really think you want to write your report based on those assumptions?” I asked. “Remember, she’s your supervisor.” A few of my students laughed; a couple of them shook their heads; we had a brief and predictable conversation about sexist stereotyping; and while I doubt I changed anyone’s mind about women in general, they all seemed to get the point: don’t base workplace behavior on those kinds of assumptions.

Then, as the conversation was winding down, someone said, “It’s good there are no girls in the class. If there were, they’d be fighting us all the way and we ‘d never have been able to talk like this.” Unfortunately, class was over and so I couldn’t pursue precisely what he meant by that, but I walked to my car with mixed feelings. On the one hand, there is wisdom in what that student said; on the other hand, there would have been value for those men in having to deal with women’s anger; and it made me start to wonder about how to structure a lesson, or lessons, around the problems of sexism in the workplace and ethical behavior in the workplace, that would remain true to the course description but also go a little deeper than some version of When you go to work, check your sexism/racism/etc. at the door. It’s something I will be thinking about, since it looks like I will be teaching technical writing for the foreseeable future.

Cross-posted on It’s All Connected.

Like Kittenloss said in her or his comment on DeadSpin, where I found this story–thanks to my friend Amy King–I expected, based on the title, “NYU Business School Professor Has Mastered the Art of Email Flaming,” to side with the student, but the details convinced me otherwise. The graduate student, and the graduate part is important, walked into Galloway’s lecture one hour late on the first day of class and Galloway asked him to leave and told him to come back the next day. This is from an email that the student sent to Galloway complaining about the lateness policy–you can’t enter class if you’re more than 15 minutes late–and explaining his lateness:

As of yesterday evening, I was interested in three different Monday night classes that all occurred simultaneously. In order to decide which class to select, my plan for the evening was to sample all three and see which one I like most. Since I had never taken your class, I was unaware of your class policy. I was disappointed that you dismissed me from class considering (1) there is no way I could have been aware of your policy and (2) considering that it was the first day of evening classes and I arrived 1 hour late (not a few minutes), it was more probable that my tardiness was due to my desire to sample different classes rather than sheer complacency.

Here are the barely tongue-in-cheek first paragraphs of Galloway’s response:

Just so I’ve got this straight…you started in one class, left 15-20 minutes into it (stood up, walked out mid-lecture), went to another class (walked in 20 minutes late), left that class (again, presumably, in the middle of the lecture), and then came to my class. At that point (walking in an hour late) I asked you to come to the next class which “bothered” you.

Correct?

You state that, having not taken my class, it would be impossible to know our policy of not allowing people to walk in an hour late. Most risk analysis offers that in the face of substantial uncertainty, you opt for the more conservative path or hedge your bet (e.g., do not show up an hour late until you know the professor has an explicit policy for tolerating disrespectful behavior, check with the TA before class, etc.). I hope the lottery winner that is your recently crowned Monday evening Professor is teaching Judgement and Decision Making or Critical Thinking.

In addition, your logic effectively means you cannot be held accountable for any code of conduct before taking a class. For the record, we also have no stated policy against bursting into show tunes in the middle of class, urinating on desks or taking that revolutionary hair removal system for a spin. However, xxxx, there is a baseline level of decorum (i.e., manners) that we expect of grown men and women who the admissions department have deemed tomorrow’s business leaders.

The rest of the letter is worth reading as well.

For me, what jumps out here–aside from the obvious question of whether Galloway is just being a dick, which I think he is not–is the degree to which this student seems to take for granted that, as a customer of the college, he has the right, because the customer is always right, to do what he did. I have run up against the “I am a customer of this school and you have therefore to give me what I want” thinking a lot over the past couple of years, and it troubles me. There are ways in which students are and should be treated as customers: they have a right to adequate parking, to clean and comfortable facilities, to access to technology, to competent teachers who come to class prepared, etc. But I a not a customer service representative and I resent the hell out of it when students treat me that way.

Cross-posted on It’s All Connected.

Zahra’s Paradise. Here’s the first page:

Only chapter one is up so far, but it looks like it’s going to be a very good book. Go check it out.

Check it out.

Here is John Krautzner’s–he’s the creator and self-styled “Alpha Male” on the page–post called “Reasons to Hit Girls:”

There are many reasons to hit girls. First of all, it keeps those bitches in line. If a girl is mouthing off to you, slug her in the face. This accomplishes three main goals. First of all, she shut the fuck up. Secondly, she will have more respect for you and your fists of justice. But most importantly, she will learn a valuable lesson that will keep her in line for years to come.

Another reason to hit girls is that it is Natural. That’s right, it is NATURAL to hit girls. God, in his infinite knowledge wrote into our DNA the instinct to hit women. If you deny this instinct, then you are not a man. If women didn’t get hit by men, they wouldn’t know what to do. They would panic and a lot of people would die.

More Reasons to Hit Girls:

it’s fun and healthy

it’s inexpensive

Chuck Norris does it

it reduces your chance of contracting HIV by 17%

I want you to

it reduces stress

they like it

The page has been up since 2006, and it’s possible that Krautzner has all but forgotten about it, but that is no excuse. Apparently, there used to be a page called “Hitting Women” that was taken down fairly recently. I have logged a protest with Facebook. If you’re on Facebook, you ought to do the same.

The spot is very cleverly done, but there are all kinds of messages here, both implicit and explicit, both conforming to gender stereotypes and not, and I am wondering what other people see and how they feel about it.

Also up on It’s All Connected.

Laid up with gout today, and for the past four days–the most serious attack I’ve had in a while; I could barely walk on Thursday and Friday–but today is the first day my head feels clear enough that I can get some work done. I’ve been watching TV and reading to distract myself, and so this seemed like a perfect time to start a “What I’m Reading” series of posts, which I’ve been wanting to do for a while.

1. Via Fatemeh Fakhraie: Why Taylor Swift Offends Little Monsters, Feminists, and Weirdos. I don’t know Taylor Swift’s music–or, if I do, because I’ve heard in on the radio, I don’t know that I know it–but I enjoyed this analysis of her image and music.
2. From Critical Mass: The Blog of the National Book Critics Circle Board of Directors, which is doing a series called “30 Books in 30 Days,” each day given over to an NBCC award nominee, this brief review of a biography of John Cheever made me want to read Cheever’s work again for the first time in a long time.
3. Also from Critical Mass, this take on Louise Gluck’s new book, A Village Life. I have always liked Gluck’s work.
4. I’d never heard of the poet Eleanor Ross Taylor, till I read this–yet one more from Critical Mass–appreciation of Captive Voices: New and Selected Poems, 1960-2008. She sounds like someone I could learn something from, not to mention I enjoyed the poems quoted in the piece. Now all I need is a semester with the time to do nothing but read.
5. New York Times writer Katherine Bouton reviews two books about Mary Anning, The Fossil Hunter: Dinosaurs, Evolution and the Woman Whose Discoveries Changed the World, by Shelley Emling and Remarkable Creatures, by Tracy Chevalier. The first is a biography, the second is a novel. Here is Bouton’s lead: “Mary Anning was one of the few women to make a success in paleontology and one of the fewer still whose success was not linked to that of a paleontologist spouse (or any spouse: she was single). She made five major fossil discoveries from 1811 to her death in 1847 and many lesser ones. Why then is she best known as the inspiration for the tongue twister “She sells seashells by the seashore?”
6. In the same issue of the Times, Denise Grady writes about the ethical issues that arise when doctors take cells from patients and then use those cells in research and, sometimes, in commercial ventures that make a whole lot of money. “A Lasting Gift to Medicine That Wasn’t Really a Gift” is a response to The Immortal Life of Henriette Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot. Henrietta Lacks was an African-American woman who died of cervical cancer in the 1950s, and Skloot’s book is an attempt to come to terms with both sides of an issue mired in questions of race, class, medical ethics and more: Lacks’ cancer cells, which were taken for analysis, went on to become a mainstay of modern medical research, being used in developing the first polio vaccine and in the development of drugs for diseases including Parkinson’s leukemia and the flu, and they not incidentally have made some people in the medical field very, very rich. Lacks’ family, who can’t even afford their own health insurance, has never seen a dime of that money. The story is not as simple a one of exploitation as that outline would suggest, which is why Skloot’s book sounds like it is worth reading, but so is Grady’s opinion piece.
7. Due in 2013, the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, will contain some significant revisions that could result, according to Times reporter, Benedict Carey, in “fewer children [getting] a diagnosis of bipolar disorder[,] ‘[b]inge eating disorder’ and ‘hypersexuality’ [becoming] part of everyday language” and a significant change in the way many mental disorders are diagnosed and treated. This book is used to define the line between the so-called normal and the so-called abnormal; changes in it could have a profound impact, therefore, on society. It is, therefore, worth paying attention to.
8. If any of you, like me, have gout, you want to know about GoutPal, the only informational site about gout that I have found–and it’s got a ton of information–that is not also trying to sell you something. I have glanced through it a couple of times, and I am beginning to realize that I need to read it. If you have gout, you probably should too.
9. An opinion piece on Tehran Bureau that’s worth reading about how to understand what happened in terms of the Green Movement in Iran on February 11th: Were the Greens Defeated?
10. Also from Tehran Bureau: Why North Tehranis Don’t Revolt: Why some people who clearly see the regime as “them,” don’t see the opposition as “us,” or at least not enough of an “us” that they are willing to risk joining the protests.

If you’re an Asian American poet, you should consider applying for this retreat. Kundiman does great work. Here’s a basic description:

In order to help mentor the next generation of Asian-American poets, Kundiman is sponsoring an annual Poetry Retreat at Fordham University. During the Retreat, nationally renowned Asian American poets will conduct workshops with fellows. Readings, writing circles and informal social gatherings will also be scheduled. Through this Retreat, Kundiman hopes to provide a safe and instructive environment that identifies and addresses the unique challenges faced by emerging Asian American poets. This 6-day Retreat will take place from Tuesday to Sunday. Workshops will not exceed eight students.

Read the rest here.

Writing in this past Thursday’s issue of The New York Times (February 4th), Michael Kimmelman compares the European tour on which the government of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad sent the Tehran Symphony Orchestra to similar tours on which the former Soviet Union would send its own world-class performers, such Sviatoslav Richter.¹ The concerts these performers gave served both to distract Western audiences from the dissidents the Soviet government was exiling to the gulags and to force those audiences into “the moral compromise [that] attending such propaganda events” would require. Given that the Iranian symphony’s tour took place “around the time the Iranian government executed two more political prisoners, charging nine others with waging war against God, a capital offense,”² it is likely that the Islamic Republic was trying to implement a similar strategy. Indeed, the title of the music the orchestra performed, “Peace and Friendship Symphony,” by Majid Entezami, would seem to make that strategy explicit. Kimmelman, however, does not have kind words for the music, calling it “a four-movement jeremiad of martial bombast and almost unfathomable incompetence and silliness, originally performed, according to Tehran Times, last February in Iran to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the revolution [and] retitled for this occasion.”

What struck me most about Kimmelman’s article, though, was not what he had to say about the similarities between what Tehran was trying to do last month and what Moscow did during the Cold War, but rather what he had to say about the differences:

The difference now isn’t just that the Tehran orchestra playing a pathetic Peace and Friendship Symphony is such a far cry from Emil Gilels playing Beethoven’s Emperor concerto. More fundamentally, it’s that a tour by an anointed symphony orchestra from the other side barely registers in the Western political consciousness. In an Internet age when everyone’s supposedly savvy to crude propaganda, the presumption seems to be that the Iranian tour doesn’t even rise to the threshold of newsworthiness.

But this presumption is a result of what the American musicologist Richard Taruskin calls a common fallacy. The fallacy, he has written, consists in turning “a blind eye on the morally or politically dubious aspects of serious music,” as if “the only legitimate object of praise or censure in art” is whether it’s good or not.

“Art is not blameless,” Mr. Taruskin writes. “Art can inflict harm.”

We take the blame-worthiness of art for granted when it comes to popular culture, criticizing Avatar, for example, for being yet one more movie about a white guy who saves a nature-loving people of color or the writers of a show like Battle Star Galactica for how they write rape into the show’s narrative; but it is good to be reminded that no art, not even classical music, is without political significance, that it too can be used as propaganda, to reinforce, or to subvert, the status quo.

In the conclusion to his review, Kimmelman quotes an Iranian businessman living in Geneva. This man was angry because he kept “seeing Ahmadinejad’s face in the music.” He said, however, that his heart “goes out to the musicians. They’re victims like the rest of us.”

Cross-posted on It’s All Connected

1. Interestingly, the piece has two different titles: “A Swiss Concert For an Audience Back in Tehran” is the print version; the online version reads, “The Sour Notes of Iran’s Art Diplomacy.”
2. And some of them are likely to be executed as well, as the government in Iran gears up to intimidate the opposition further in the days before February 11th, the anniversary of the founding of the Islamic Republic.