Spring Break '09 - Part 1

Leaving beautiful Chicago for Providence, Rhode Island to attend the Fulbright Conference 2009.

On the lawn of Harvard University.

Harvard University.

Harvard Law School Admission Office.

Harvard Law Review's building - the most competitive and prestigious law review journal. President Obama was the head of this journal when he was a law student at Harvard.

Harvard Law Library - the largest law library in USA, with many floors, including underground.

Inside the Harvard Law Library.

A typical large seminar room in Harvard Law school.

Harvard University quad.

Widener Library - the main library in Harvard University.

Harvard Square - the scene which greets you as you exit the train station to Harvard University.

The prestigious JFK School of Government, where many world politicians attend.

The beautiful Charles River dividing Harvard University, Boston University and MIT.

Harvard University's football field.

MIT's art centre - reminds me of The Esplanade.

The prestigious Massacheusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, Massacheusetts.

MIT's famous dome building.

Taken from MIT of the Charles River, overlooking downtown Boston.

Boston University Law School's entrance.

The architecture at the back of the STATA Center.

The unique STATA Center in MIT, designed by the Pritzker prize-winning architect Frank Gehry.

Spring Break '09 - Part 2

Downtown Boston. This is the tallest building in Boston - the John Hancock Tower, with a viewing gallery at the top.

The fancy and chic Newbury Street in downtown Boston.

Boston Capitol State Building.

Downtown Boston -  a mix of classic and new buildings.

The famous Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Memorial Bridge welcomes you to Boston.

My breakfast room at the Old Castle, Providence.

Providence Capitol State Building.

They put me up in a suite at The Biltmore in Providence, Rhode Island for the Fulbright Conference. I even have my own reading/working room with a huge reading chair!

The Ballroom of the magnificent The Biltmore, Providence where most events were held for the Fulbright Conference 2009.

Providence Capitol State Building.

An aerial view of Providence, Rhode Island.

Spring Break '09 - Part 3

I was in the team that tackled Educational issues. We visited a local high school in Providence, Rhode Island - Feinstein High School - and had an interesting exchange.

The mural on Feinstein High School - drawn by the students themselves.

One of the students playing guitar for us in the music room. They even had to learn music composition. Awesome!

Attended a panel on social entrepreneurship by panelists: Prof Alan Harlam (Brown University), Prof Sami Nerenberg (Rhode Island School of Design), Clay Rockefeller (Founder, The Steel Yard) and Lorne Adrain (Founder, Social Venture Partners)

I was hosted for dinner by a local resident (an ex-Fulbright scholar too) at their home together with a Hungarian and an Israelite. The host painted those beautiful paintings and made her own potteries.

We were given a tour of Newport, Rhode Island and visited this magnificent castle. Unfortunately cameras are not allowed in. It seemed that everybody in Newport lives in such huge mansions. The residents lived here only 21 days out of a year! This 70-room mansion housed only 4 family members! They have another mansion in New York with 110 rooms. Go figure!

The side garden stretching and overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. The view is magnificent.

South Alifson Pier, Newport.

My flight back to Boulder was delayed due to bad weather (yet again!). Had a layover in Dulles, Washington DC. This was a scene early in the morning from my hotel room.

4/20 on April 20 at my campus. This was a scene from Norlin Quad. It was about 12,ooo-strong crowd.

That Which Is Worth Bringing

If you're lugging a heavy bag,

don't fail to look inside it

to see whether what is inside is bitter or sweet.

If it's really worth bringing along, bring it;

otherwise, empty your sack

and redeem yourself from fruitless effort and disgrace.

Only put into your sack

that which is worth bringing to a righteous sovereign.

... Mathnawi IV: 1574-1577, Mevlana Rumi

Al-Irsyad

SINGAPORE — After starting the day with prayers and songs in honor of the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday, the students at the Madrasa Al Irsyad Al Islamiah here in Singapore turned to the secular. An all-girls chemistry class grappled with compounds and acids while other students focused on English, math and other subjects from the national curriculum.

Teachers exhorted their students to ask questions. Some, true to the school’s embrace of new technology, gauged their students’ comprehension with individual polling devices.

“It’s like ‘American Idol,’ ” said Razak Mohamed Lazim, the head of Al Irsyad, which means “rightly guided.”

A reference to the reality television program in relation to an Islamic school may come as a surprise. But Singapore’s Muslim leaders see Al Irsyad, with its strict balance between religious and secular studies, as the future of Islamic education, not only in this city-state but elsewhere in Southeast Asia.

Two madrasas in Indonesia have already adopted Al Irsyad’s curriculum and management, attracted to what they say is a progressive model of Islamic education in tune with the modern world. For them, Al Irsyad is the counterpoint to many traditional madrasas that emphasize religious studies at the expense of everything else. Instead of preaching radicalism, the school’s in-house textbooks praise globalization and international organizations like the United Nations.

Leaders in Islamic education here rue the fact that, in much of the West, madrasas everywhere have been broad-brushed as militant hotbeds where students spend days learning the Koran by rote. Still, they were relieved that not one terrorism suspect in the region in recent years was a product of Singapore’s madrasas, though some suspects were linked to madrasas in Indonesia and other Southeast Asian countries. That association deepened a long-running debate over the nature of Islamic education.

“The Muslim world in general is struggling with its Islamic education,” Mr. Razak said, explaining that Islamic schools had failed to adapt to the modern world. “In many cases, it’s also the challenge the Muslim world is facing. We are not addressing the needs of Islam as a faith that has to be alive, interacting with other communities and other religions.”

In Indonesia, most Islamic schools still pay little attention to secular subjects, believing that religious studies are enough, said Indri Rini Andriani, a former computer programmer who is the principal of Al Irsyad Satya Islamic School, one of the Indonesian schools that model themselves on the school here.

“They feel that conventional education is best for the children, while some of us feel that we have to adjust with advances in technology and what’s going on in the world,” Ms. Indri said.

Here, the Islamic Religious Council of Singapore, a statutory board that advises the government on Muslim affairs, gave Al Irsyad a central spot in its new Islamic center. Long the top academic performer among the country’s six madrasas, Al Irsyad was chosen to be in the center as “a showcase,” said Mr. Razak, who is also an official at the religious council.

The school’s 900 primary- and secondary-level students follow the national curriculum of the country’s public schools while also taking religious instruction. To accommodate both, the school day is three hours longer than at the mainstream schools.

... for complete article, The NY Times

Letters To A Young Poet

Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart; and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. 

Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. 

And the point is, to live everything. 

Live the questions now. 

Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

... Letters To A Young Poet (Letter 4), Rainer Maria Rilke

The Divine Irreference Of Images

The simulacrum is never what hides the truth - it is truth that hides the fact that there is none. The simulacrum is true. 

-Ecclesiastes 

Beyond medicine and the army favored terrains of simulation, the question returns to religion and the simulacrum of divinity: "I forbade that there be any simulacra in the temples because the divinity that animates nature can never be represented." Indeed it can be. But what becomes of the divinity when it reveals itself in icons, when it is multiplied in simulacra? Does it remain the supreme power that is simply incarnated in images as a visible theology? Or does it volatilize itself in the simulacra that, alone, deploy their power and pomp of fascination - the visible machinery of icons substituted for the pureand intelligible Idea of God? This is precisely what was feared by Iconoclasts, whose millennial quarrel is still with us today.*3 This is precisely because they predicted this omnipotence of simulacra, the faculty simulacra have of effacing God from the conscience of man, and the destructive, annihilating truth that they allow to appear - that deep down God never existed, that only the simulacrum ever existed, even that God himself was never anything but his own simulacrum - from this came their urge to destroy the images. If they could have believed that these images only obfuscated or masked the Platonic Idea of God, there would have been no reason to destroy them. One can live with the idea of distorted truth. But their metaphysical despair came from the idea that the image didn't conceal anything at all, and that these images were in essence not images, such as an original model would have made them, but perfect simulacra, forever radiant with their own fascination. Thus this death of the divine referential must be exorcised at all costs. 

One can see that the iconoclasts, whom one accuses of disdaining and negating images, were those who accorded them their true value, in contrast to the iconolaters who only saw reflections in them and were content to venerate a filigree God. On the other hand, one can say that the icon worshipers were the most modern minds, the most adventurous, because, in the guise of having God become apparent in the mirror of images, they were already enacting his death and his disappearance in the epiphany of his representations (which, perhaps, they already knew no longer represented anything, that they were purely a game, but that it was therein the great game lay - knowing also that it is dangerous to unmask images, since they dissimulate the fact that there is nothing behind them). 

This was the approach of the Jesuits, who founded their politics on the virtual disappearance of God and on the worldly and spectacular manipulation of consciences - the evanescence of God in the epiphany of power - the end of transcendence, which now only serves as an alibi for a strategy altogether free of influences and signs. Behind the baroqueness of images hides the éminence grise of politics. 

This way the stake will always have been the murderous power of images, murderers of the real, murderers of their own model, as the Byzantine icons could be those of divine identity. To this murderous power is opposed that of representations as a dialectical power, the visible and intelligible mediation of the Real. All Western faith and good faith became engaged in this wager on representation: that a sign could refer to the depth of meaning, that a sign could be exchanged for meaning and that something could guarantee this exchange - God of course. But what if God himself can be simulated, that is to say can be reduced to the signs that constitute faith? Then the whole system becomes weightless, it is no longer itself anything but a gigantic simulacrum - not unreal, but a simulacrum, that is to say never exchanged for the real, but exchanged for itself, in an uninterrupted circuit without reference or circumference. 

Such is simulation, insofar as it is opposed to representation. Representation stems from the principle of the equivalence of the sign and of the real (even if this equivalence is Utopian, it is a fundamental axiom). Simulation, on the contrary, stems from the Utopia of the principle of equivalence, from the radical negation of the sign as value, from the sign as the reversion and death sentence of every reference. Whereas representation attempts to absorb simulation by interpreting it as a false representation, simulation envelops the whole edifice of representation itself as a simulacrum. 

Such would be the successive phases of the image: 

- it is the reflection of a profound reality; 

- it masks and denatures a profound reality; 

- it masks the absence of a profound reality; 

- it has no relation to any reality whatsoever; 

- it is its own pure simulacrum. 

In the first case, the image is a good appearance - representation is of the sacramental order. In the second, it is an evil appearance - it is of the order of maleficence. In the third, it plays at being an appearance - it is of the order of sorcery. In the fourth, it is no longer of the order of appearances, but of simulation.

The transition from signs that dissimulate something to signs that dissimulate that there is nothing marks a decisive turning point. The first reflects a theology of truth and secrecy (to which the notion of ideology still belongs). The second inaugurates the era of simulacra and of simulation, in which there is no longer a God to recognize his own, no longer a Last Judgment to separate the false from the true, the real from its artificial resurrection, as everything is already dead and resurrected in advance.

When the real is no longer what it was, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a plethora of myths of origin and of signs of reality - a plethora of truth, of secondary objectivity, and authenticity. Escalation of the true, of lived experience, resurrection of the figurative where the object and substance have disappeared. Panic-stricken production of the real and of the referential, parallel to and greater than the panic of material production: this is how simulation appears in the phase that concerns us - a strategy of the real, of the neoreal and the hyperreal that everywhere is the double of a strategy of deterrence.

... Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard

The Lover Who Slept

A lover, tired out by the tears he wept,

Lay in exhaustion on the earth and slept;

When his beloved came and saw him there,

Sunk fast in sleep, at peace, without a care,

She took a pen and in an instant wrote,

Then fastened to his sleeve, a little note.

When he awoke and read her words his pain

(Increased a thousandfold) returned again -

"If you sell silver in the town," he read,

"The market's opened, rouse your sleepy head;

If faith is your concern, pray through the night -

Prostrate yourself until the dawning light;

But if you are a lover, blush with shame;

Sleep is unworthy of the lover's name!

He watches with the wind throughout the day;

He sees the moon rise up and fade away -

But you do neither, though you weep and sigh;

Your love for me looks like an empty lie.

A man who sleeps before death's sleep I call

A lover of himself, and that is all!

You've no idea of love, and may your sleep

Be like your ignorance - prolonged and deep!"

... The Conference of the Birds, Farid al-Din Attar

Bertrand Russell

"Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness--that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what--at last--I have found.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me." 

... What I Have Lived For, Bertrand Russell

A Farewell Letter

If for an instant God were to forget that I am a rag doll and gave me a piece of life, possibly I wouldn’t say all that I think, but rather I would think of all that I say. I would value things, not for their worth but for what they mean.

I would sleep little, dream more, understanding that for each minute we close our eyes we lose sixty seconds of light.

I would walk when others hold back. I would wake when others sleep. I would listen when others talk, and how I would enjoy a good chocolate ice cream!

If God were to give me a piece of life, I would dress simply, throw myself face first into the sun, baring not only my body but also my soul.

My God, if I had a heart, I would write my hate on ice, and wait for the sun to show. Over the stars I would paint with a Van Gogh, dream a Benedetti poem, and a Serrat song would be the serenade I’d offer to the moon.

With my tears I would water roses, to feel the pain of their thorns, and the red kiss of their petals. My God, if I had a piece of life…

I wouldn’t let a single day pass without telling the people I love that I love them. I would convince each woman and each man that they are my favorites, and I would live in love with love.

I would show men how very wrong they are to think that they cease to be in love when they grow old, not knowing that they grow old when they cease to love!

To a child I shall give wings, but I shall let him learn to fly on his own. I would teach the old that death does not come with old age, but with forgetting.

So much have I learned from you, oh men… I have learned that everyone wants to live on the peak of the mountain, without knowing that real happiness is in how it is scaled. I have learned that when a newborn child squeezes for the first time with his tiny fist his father’s finger, he has him trapped forever.

I have learned that a man has the right to look down on another only when he has to help the other get to his feet.

From you I have learned so many things, but in truth they won’t be of much use, for when I keep them within this suitcase, unhappily shall I be dying.

... Gabriel Garcia Marquez, his farewell letter on retiring from public life after being diagnosed with cancer of the lymph nodes

J.G. Ballard

"I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring. And that`s my one fear: that everything has happened; nothing exciting or new or interesting is ever going to happen again... the future is just going to be a vast, conforming suburb of the soul"

"What our children have to fear is not the cars on the highways of tomorrow but our own pleasure in calculating the most elegant parameters of their deaths"

... J. G. Ballard, in honor of his demise today.

My Best

"I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. 

But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best."

... Norma Jeane Baker @ Marilyn Monroe

The Hyperreal And The Imaginary

Disneyland is a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulacra. It is first of all a play of illusions and phantasms: the Pirates, the Frontier, the Future World, etc. This imaginary world is supposed to ensure the success of the operation. But what attracts the crowds the most is without a doubt the social microcosm, the religious, miniaturized pleasure of real America, of its constraints and joys. One parks outside and stands in line inside, one is altogether abandoned at the exit. The only phantasmagoria in this imaginary world lies in the tenderness and warmth of the crowd, and in the sufficient and excessive number of gadgets necessary to create the multitudinous effect. The contrast with the absolute solitude of the parking lot - a veritable concentration camp - is total. Or, rather: inside, a whole panoply of gadgets magnetizes the crowd in directed flows - outside, solitude is directed at a single gadget: the automobile. By an extraordinary coincidence (but this derives without a doubt from the enchantment inherent to this universe), this frozen, childlike world is found to have been conceived and realized by a man who is himself now cryogenized: Walt Disney, who awaits his resurrection through an increase of 180 degrees centigrade. 

Thus, everywhere in Disneyland the objective profile of America, down to the morphology of individuals and of the crowd, is drawn. All its values are exalted by the miniature and the comic strip. Embalmed and pacified. Whence the possibility of an ideological analysis of Disneyland (L. Marin did it very well in Utopiques, jeux d'espace [Utopias, play of space]): digest of the American way of life, panegyric of American values, idealized transposition of a contradictory reality. Certainly. But this masks something else and this "ideological" blanket functions as a cover for a simulation of the third order: Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the "real" country, all of "real" America that is Disneyland (a bit like prisons are there to hide that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology) but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle. 

The imaginary of Disneyland is neither true nor false, it is a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate the fiction of the real in the opposite camp. Whence the debility of this imaginary, its infantile degeneration. This world wants to be childish in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the "real" world, and to conceal the fact that true childishness is everywhere - that it is that of the adults themselves who come here to act the child in order to foster illusions as to their real childishness. 

Disneyland is not the only one, however. Enchanted Village, Magic Mountain, Marine World: Los Angeles is surrounded by these imaginary stations that feed reality, the energy of the real to a city whose mystery is precisely that of no longer being anything but a network of incessant, unreal circulation - a city of incredible proportions but without space, without dimension. As much as electrical and atomic power stations, as much as cinema studios, this city, which is no longer anything but an immense scenario and a perpetual pan shot, needs this old imaginary like a sympathetic nervous system made up of childhood signals and faked phantasms. 

Disneyland: a space of the regeneration of the imaginary as waste-treatment plants are elsewhere, and even here. Everywhere today one must recycle waste, and the dreams, the phantasms, the historical, fairylike, legendary imaginary of children and adults is a waste product, the first great toxic excrement of a hyperreal civilization. On a mental level, Disneyland is the prototype of this new function. But all the sexual, psychic, somatic recycling institutes, which proliferate in California, belong to the same order. People no longer look at each other, but there are institutes for that. They no longer touch each other, but there is contactotherapy. They no longer walk, but they go jogging, etc. 

Everywhere one recycles lost faculties, or lost bodies, or lost sociality, or the lost taste for food. One reinvents penury, asceticism, vanished savage naturalness: natural food, health food, yoga. Marshall Sahlins's idea that it is the economy of the market, and not of nature at all, that secretes penury, is verified, but at a secondary level: here, in the sophisticated confines of a triumphal market economy is reinvented a penury/sign, a penury/simulacrum, a simulated behavior of the underdeveloped (including the adoption of Marxist tenets) that, in the guise of ecology, of energy crises and the critique of capital, adds a final esoteric aureole to the triumph of an esoteric culture. Nevertheless, maybe a mental catastrophe, a mental implosion and involution without precedent lies in wait for a system of this kind, whose visible signs would be those of this strange obesity, or the incredible coexistence of the most bizarre theories and practices, which correspond to the improbable coalition of luxury, heaven, and money, to the improbable luxurious materialization of life and to undiscoverable contradictions. 

... Simulacra And Simulation, Jean Baudrillard