December 14, 2010
3QD Politics Prize 2010 Finalists
The editors of 3QD have made their decision. The twenty semifinalists have been winnowed down to six, and three wildcard entries added. Thanks again to all the participants.
Once again, Carla Goller has provided a "trophy" logo that our finalists may choose to display on their own blogs. And if you like our site, please do add us to your blogroll!
So, here it is, the final list that I am sending to Mr. Lewis H. Lapham, who will select the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd prize winners: (in alphabetical order by blog name here)
- 3 Quarks Daily, The Trappers and the Trapped
- Huffington Post, The Two Most Essential, Abhorrent, Intolerable Lies Of George W. Bush's Memoir
- Huffington Post, Haiti's Political and Economic Earthquake "Made in the USA"
- Muhammad Cohen, Twenty reasons Barack Obama stinks
- Paul Street’s Blog, A Comeback for Chattel Slavery? Remarkable Revelations from a Top Obama Aide
- Stephen Walt, Why America is going to regret the Cordoba House controversy
- The Heart of the Matter, It's Just a Leak
- The Philosopher's Beard, Politics: Can't Someone Else Do It?
- Zunguzungu, Julian Assange and the Computer Conspiracy; “To destroy this invisible government”
We'll announce the three winners on December 21, 2010.
Good luck!
Abbas
P.S. The editors of 3QD will not be making any comments on our deliberations, or the process by which we made our decision, other than to simply say that we picked what we thought were the best posts out of the semifinalists, and added three others which we also liked.
Posted by Abbas Raza at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
Video Games and the Future of Storytelling
Posted by Robin Varghese at 12:11 PM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
How Can Anyone Defend Kissinger Now?
Christopher Hitchens in Slate:
Henry Kissinger should have the door shut in his face by every decent person and should be shamed, ostracized, and excluded. No more dinners in his honor; no more respectful audiences for his absurdly overpriced public appearances; no more smirking photographs with hostesses and celebrities; no more soliciting of his worthless opinions by sycophantic editors and producers. One could have demanded this at almost any time during the years since his role as the only unindicted conspirator in the Nixon/Watergate gang, and since the exposure of his war crimes and crimes against humanity in Indochina, Chile, Argentina, Cyprus, East Timor, and several other places. But the latest revelations from the Nixon Library might perhaps turn the scale at last. (Click here to listen to the conversation; the offending section begins at 13:56.)
Chatting eagerly with his famously racist and foul-mouthed boss in March 1973, following an appeal from Golda Meir to press Moscow to allow the emigration of Soviet Jewry, Kissinger is heard on the tapes to say:
The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy. And if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.
(One has to love that uneasy afterthought …)
In the past, Kissinger has defended his role as enabler to Nixon's psychopathic bigotry, saying that he acted as a restraining influence on his boss by playing along and making soothing remarks. This can now go straight into the lavatory pan, along with his other hysterical lies. Obsessed as he was with the Jews, Nixon never came close to saying that he'd be indifferent to a replay of Auschwitz. For this, Kissinger deserves sole recognition.
It's hard to know how to classify this observation in the taxonomy of obscenity. Should it be counted as tactical Holocaust pre-denial? That would be too mild. It's actually a bit more like advance permission for another Holocaust. Which is why I wonder how long the official spokesmen of American Jewry are going to keep so quiet. Nothing remotely as revolting as this was ever uttered by Jesse Jackson or even Mel Gibson, to name only two famous targets of the wrath of the Anti-Defamation League. Where is the outrage? Is Kissinger—normally beseeched for comments on subjects about which he knows little or nothing—going to be able to sit out requests from the media that he clarify this statement? Does he get to keep his op-ed perch in reputable newspapers with nothing said? Will the publishers of his mendacious and purloined memoirs continue to give him expensive lunches as if nothing has happened?
After I published my book calling for his indictment, many of Kissinger's apologists said that, rough though his methods might have been, they were at least directed at defeating Communism. I never quite saw how the genocide in East Timor, say, had any effect in eroding the Berlin Wall. But I also pointed out that Kissinger did many favors for the heirs of Stalin and Mao: telling President Gerald Ford not to invite Alexander Solzhenitsyn to the White House, for example, and making lavish excuses for the massacre in Tiananmen Square. He is that rare and foul beast, a man whose record shows sympathy for communism and fascism.
Posted by Robin Varghese at 10:29 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (4)
Needed: An Economics for Grownups
Over at The National Review, Matthew Shaffer interviews Deirdre McCloskey:
Shaffer: Before Bourgeois Dignity you wrote The Bourgeois Virtues. Do you think our debt-ridden culture is a manifestation of a decline in the bourgeois virtues, or is that just romantic nonsense?
McCloskey: Conservative romantic nonsense, similar to the cries in the 18th century that commerce would corrupt the Spartan virtues. Dr. Johnson, who was a conservative but no sort of romantic, said in 1778, “Depend upon it, sir, every state of society is as luxurious as it can be. Men always take the best they can get.” And the blessed David Hume had said in 1742, “Nor is a porter less greedy of money, which he spends on bacon and brandy, than a courtier, who purchases champagne and ortolans [little songbirds rated a delicacy]. Riches are valuable at all times, and to all men.” Of course.
There’s a progressive version of the nonsense, the complaining about “consumerism.”
A more up-to-date reply is that so long as various Oriental protectionists (in the 1970s it was the Japanese, not the Chinese) are so foolish as to send Americans TV sets and hammers and so forth in exchange for IOUs and green pieces of paper engraved with American heroes, wonderful. Would you personally turn down such a deal? If your personal checks circulated as currency, and the grocer was willing to give you tons of groceries in exchange for eventually depreciated Matt-dollars, wouldn’t you go for it? I would, and drink champagne.
Shaffer: Do you think bourgeois virtues can be inculcated by public institutions, including schools?
McCloskey: The merchant academies of England in the 17th and 18th centuries raised up prudent bourgeois boys (they were mostly excluded from Oxford and Cambridge because many of the merchant families were not conforming members of the Church of England). The universities in Scotland had teachers like Adam Smith, and raised up boys (they were very young in Scotland) who admired commerce. Our culture, so corrupt and so little reflecting the classical virtues in the eyes of conservatives like Allan Bloom, admires innovation extravagantly in its rock music and its movies and its ethernet. It’s innovation, not respect for hierarchy or love of military glory, that makes for a successful society.
Posted by Robin Varghese at 10:07 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
Against Literary Darwinism
Jonathan Kramnick in Critical Inquiry:
Literary Darwinism promises to show that literature played an important role in the evolution of the species, but what adaptive function could be served by bare themes, by subject matter as such? Failing to describe how “the adapted mind produces literature,” literary Darwinism often falls back on more general and even genteel notions of improvement (LD, p. xii). The move has a certain logic. Literary Darwinism has a difficult time finding a place for literary forms in the story of adaptation under selection pressure. At the same time, it is committed to the proposition that literature must have helped us to become the species we are. The result of this curious imbalance is that literature simply is about who we are in a relatively straightforward and uplifting sense. Literary texts provide “lively and powerful images of human life suffused with the feeling and understanding of the astonishingly capable and complete human beings who wrote them.”77 There is something tender-hearted in this bid for the function of literature to create “healthy human possibility” (LD, p. 68). It exchanges a hardheaded naturalism for mushier notions of moral cultivation. and strikes an ethical note reminiscent of F. R. Leavis. But surely this is a most remarkable turn of events. Casting about for a function specific to literature, the friends of adaptation seem to settle for it making us better, more decent, or more complete human beings (see LD, p. 68). Yet value-laden ideas like complete humanity have no meaning in the terms of evolutionary or any other science and tell us very little about any cultural artifact. And this is precisely my point. With the turn to a kind of pabulum, Darwinian criticism seems not very scientific at all.
Posted by Robin Varghese at 10:02 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (2)
the roads of Guatemala
The roads of Guatemala have always been its best and worst theatre. Beautiful dirt roads leading to a vast green nowhere. Old gravel roads winding up active volcanoes, around rivers and lakes, through screaming jungles. Long, eternal roads whose ends dip into two great oceans. City roads that are barely paved, barely straight and barely navigable. A few years ago, after spending some time in Spain, I finally moved back to Guatemala and was struck when friends and family members gave me the same piece of advice. Don’t honk your horn at another car, don’t overtake another car, don’t dare raise your headlights at another car. Why? On several occasions I forgot this advice and was then able to confirm its gloomy wisdom. Once I was chased fiercely for ten or fifteen minutes, until my pursuer either got tired or grew bored. Still another time, and without me ever knowing why, an elderly woman drove for a few blocks right next to my car, screaming and insulting me with the most lavish vocabulary I’d ever heard. Another time a man pulled up beside me at a red light and proceeded to show me, all the while smiling, his handgun.more from Eduardo Halfon at Granta here.
Posted by Morgan Meis at 08:54 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
Who is Hedda Sterne?
At the summit of “The Irascibles,” Life magazine’s 1951 portrait of the Abstract Expressionist painters, stands an imperious-looking woman, the Romanian-born artist Hedda Sterne. She is the only female in the photograph and, in some sense, the most prominent figure—the “feather on top,” as she once put it. Now, at age one hundred, she is the sole survivor. “I am known more for that darn photo than for eighty years of work,” Sterne told me a few years ago. “If I had an ego, it would bother me.” Plus, she said, “it is a lie.” Why? “I was not an Abstract Expressionist. Nor was I an Irascible.” Who is Hedda Sterne? In 2003, when she was ninety-two and still drawing every day, I interviewed her and tape-recorded the conversation. We met in her apartment on East 71st Street near Third Avenue, where she’d lived for almost sixty years—first with her then husband, Saul Steinberg, the New Yorker artist, and later, beginning in the 1960s, alone. The kitchen and living room were one space. On a table were Sterne’s recent white-on-white drawings. Just about all the other art was Steinberg’s. On a wall hung a trompe l’oeil work spoofing Mondrian; a small table was piled with Steinberg’s wooden “books.” Over the stove hung a faux diploma for cooking, which Steinberg had presented to Sterne in the 1950s, and over the sink was another diploma, for dishwashing. A large carpet of raw canvas lay on the floor, with handwritten lines organized into the squares of a grid. This, I realized, was Sterne’s Diary from 1976, and a perfect emblem of her: a dense fabric of words, drawn with intense concentration, left to be obliterated underfoot.more from Sarah Boxer at the NYRB here.
Posted by Morgan Meis at 08:50 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
when allegory gets nasty
If you like torture porn, rape porn, incest porn, paedo porn, snuff porn, necro porn and (a bit of a breakthrough here) newborn porn, A Serbian Film has much to offer you. Even after the 49 cuts demanded by the BBFC spoilsports, it certainly earns its place on the shortlist for that sought-after accolade, "the nastiest film ever made". Good luck to it, you may or may not think. Yet we're not allowed to leave it at that. Famously, this film is laid before us not as a robust piece of entertainment for what will doubtless prove an appreciative niche audience, but as a political allegory. Whenever he gets the chance, the director, Srdjan Spasojevic, insists: "This is a diary of our own molestation by the Serbian government. It's about the monolithic power of leaders who hypnotise you to do things you don't want to do." Understandably enough, this claim has been derided as a pathetic attempt to accord respectability to a straightforward exercise in sensationalist depravity. Yet the more you hear of Spasojevic's apologia, the more sincere he seems to be. He has after all lived through a traumatic period in his country's history. He says he spent a decade trying to work out how to translate its essence into cinema, and concluded that pornography was the only possible metaphor for "the almost indescribable and exploitative chaos" that had dominated his life.more from David Cox at The Guardian here.
Posted by Morgan Meis at 08:48 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (2)
Tuesday Poem
To the Newlyweds in the Barrio
Subtract the size of the world
from an empty stomach
and over the difference construct a roof.
Wall up hunger
give it no room to spread
to the eyes, hands and feet.
Later you'll be able to afford a TV
to bring you reports
of soldiers invading with their shadows.
But for the time
all you can afford is a radio
and guilt as you dance around your house.
by Rebecca Gonzales
from After Aztlan - Latino Poets of the Nineties
David R. Godine, Publisher, 1992
Posted by Jim Culleny at 07:35 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
The wonders of the cell go online
From MSNBC:
For many of us, the wonders of cell biology came alive when we peered through a microscope at an amoeba in science class. Today, a new online image library of cells brings that same sense of wonder and magic to anyone with an Internet connection. The library contains more than 1,000 images, videos, and animations of cells from a variety of organisms — from the Chinese hamster (Cricetulus griseus) to humans (Homo sapiens). The database aims to advance research on cellular activity with the ultimate goal of improving human health, according to the American Society for Cell Biology, which has created the database in partnership with Glencoe Software and the Open Microscopy Environment.
"In our research of disease, one of the key features is to understand the mechanism of disease — and that is going to happen, in many cases, at the cellular level," David Orloff, manager of The Cell image library, told me. For example, the library will make it possible for scientists to compare different cell types online and understand the nature of specific cells and cellular processes, both normal and abnormal. This may lead to new discoveries about diseases, as well as new targets for drug development.
More here.
Posted by Azra Raza at 05:57 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
Real Evidence for Diets That Are Just Imaginary
John Tierney in The New York Times:
Call it the Imagine Diet. You wouldn’t have to count calories, track food points or memorize rules. If, say, some alleged friend left a box of chocolate truffles in your home this holiday season, you would neither throw them away nor inhale them all. Instead, you would start eating imaginary chocolates.
You would give yourself a few seconds to imagine tasting and chewing one truffle. (If there’s a picture on the box, you could focus on it.) Then you would imagine eating another, and then another and another...until at last you could open the box of real chocolates without making a total pig of yourself. And then you could start on fantasies of other vices you wanted to eliminate. So far, the Imagine Diet exists only in my imagination, as does any evidence of its efficacy. But there is some real evidence for the benefits of imaginary eating from experiments at Carnegie Mellon University reported in the current issue of Science. When people imagined themselves eating M & M’s or pieces of cheese, they became less likely to gorge themselves on the real thing.
More here.
Posted by Azra Raza at 05:48 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
3QD Politics Prize 2010 Semifinalists
Hello,
The voting round of our politics prize (details here) is over. A total of 493 votes were cast for the 44 nominees (click here for full list of nominees). Thanks to the nominators and the voters for participating.
Carla Goller has designed a "trophy" logo that our top twenty vote-getters may choose to display on their own blogs. So here they are, in descending order from the most voted-for:
- Muhammad Cohen, Twenty reasons Barack Obama stinks
- Huffington Post, Haiti's Political and Economic Earthquake "Made in the USA"
- 3 Quarks Daily, The Trappers and the Trapped
- Sexy Beast, Spitzer, Stop Hiding From Your Call Girl Past
- Accidental Blogger, What was malt liquor?
- Farming Pathogens, The Alan Greenspan Strain
- 3 Quarks Daily, Who Will Be A Champion Of The Left We Can Believe In? As Bush-lite, Obama Ain't It
- 3 Quarks Daily, The Revolution Will Not Be PowerPointed
- True/Slant, Some Iran Questions Without Answers
- The South Asian Idea Weblog, 9/11: Socrates, Machiavelli, Christ and Gandhi
- Wisdom of the West, Politics
- 3 Quarks Daily, War and the American Republic
- NPR Check, Asymmetric Accomplices to Murder
- PH2.1, Getting to Agreement
- Zunguzungu, Julian Assange and the Computer Conspiracy; “To destroy this invisible government”
- The Philosopher's Beard, Politics: Can't Someone Else Do It?
- The Heart of the Matter, It's Just a Leak
- Naked Capitalism, End This Fed
- Stephen Walt, Why America is going to regret the Cordoba House controversy
- Black Agenda Report, The Unraveling of the Empire of Finance Capital
The editors of 3 Quarks Daily will now pick the top six entries from these, and after possibly adding up to three "wildcard" entries, will send that list of finalists very soon, possibly even later today, to Lewis Lapham. We will also post the list of finalists here then.
Good luck!
Abbas
Posted by Abbas Raza at 12:05 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
December 13, 2010
Spelunking the Space behind the Bathroom Mirror
One night more than a decade ago, I found myself alone in the apartment I shared with several friends from college in Minneapolis. It was one of those humid summer nights where the only reasonable thing to wear were one’s boxers and a t-shirt. I was, at the time, seeking to cultivate a pompadour; this was long before there were a raft of metrosexual hair products to assist in such a project, so I was reduced to buying bryl-creem from the local old-school pharmacy. Bryl-creem, by the way, reeks: whenever you see those black and white photographs of crooners from the ‘30s and ‘40s, know that they must have trailed clouds of vaporous, vaguely mint-smelling fog.
None of us were what you would call “gainfully employed” at the time, yet all of my roommates had gone out for the evening with their girlfriends. These were the days of what DeLillo calls “languor and drift,” when the notion of a “career” was a distant horizon that can be safely ignored for the brief but more intriguing possibilities of pursuing sensuous intensities an
d simple drunkennesses with little thought or care for tomorrow’s hangover. I was, then, left to luxuriate in the pleasures of self-pitying loneliness and solitude. I thought that perhaps I would practice my pompadour in the bathroom mirror. This was an older apartment—perhaps built in the ‘30s—and the lighting wasn’t so good—everything was cast in a lovely golden haze, like the opening scenes of The Godfather with Don Corleone massaging his cat. In this flavescent light signaling nostalgia (or maybe I only remember it that way…ha!) I reached atop the medicine cabinet to grasp the foul-smelling pomade and inadvertently knocked it over. It fell behind the medicine cabinet, into one of those non-spaces like the walls that separated room from room, one of those unthought about regions that contain things like pipes and wires that we tend not to want to see or think about. Realizing that I had lost my bryl-creem and thus, my pompadour, I grabbed a flashlight and stood atop the commode to see if I could retrieve it from its crypt. Leaning over the sink I strained to see what had become of the tube; shining the light into the small crevice that separated the top of the medicine cabinet and mirror from the bathroom wall, I observed a range of other objects lying on the pink fiberglass insulation—a razor, what looked to be a receipt, a variety of q-tips, a comb, and a tube of hair gel, and other things that I can’t really remember.
Continue reading "Spelunking the Space behind the Bathroom Mirror"
Posted by Tom Jacobs at 12:50 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (5)
Human Extinction: Not the Worst Case Scenario
The year is 3010 and an interesting new species has evolved: a muscular, knuckle-walking primate with sparse body hair and a strikingly human face. It appears to be deformed, with extra non-functional limbs in various anatomical positions--like something out of a sci-fi horror story or a genetic engineering experiment gone wrong. The creatures are vicious. Individuals routinely attack and eat members of their own species.
This generally isn’t how we envision our species a thousand years from now. More typical scenarios feature technological advancements, like flying cars and intergalactic travel. We might imagine that future humans will have eliminated disease and extended our lifespans substantially.
It’s debatable as to which of these scenarios is more likely. And of course, both could be far off the mark. But this much is clear: there’s trouble ahead for our species if we continue on our current path. The problems that future generations will face are largely predictable.
Our environment is becoming increasingly toxic, with carcinogens and teratogens, allergens, hormone distrupters, and pharmaceuticals accumulating steadily. Such pollutants also build up in the tissues of animals that we eat and depend upon.
Food shortages are anticipated. With the population increasing at alarming rates, there’ll be a lot more human mouths to feed. Heavier reliance on meat will worsen environmental problems, making clean drinking water harder to find. Non-animal food sources may also be much scarcer. If honey bees succumb to the threats they currently face, we’ll lose most of the foods that depend on bees for pollination.
Disease will be rife. Infectious disease will likely rise with the loss of biodiversity. Authors of a paper published last year in BioScience suggested that biodiversity loss “can increase the incidence and distribution of infectious diseases affecting humans."1 Authors of a more recent paper appearing in Nature came to a similar conclusion, noting that, in many cases, biodiversity “seems to protect organisms, including humans, from transmission of infectious diseases.”2 Increased population size and proximity to one another will exacerbate the problem.
Cancer and environmental diseases will be widespread due in part to the greater toxicity of the physical environment and the foods we eat. Genetic disease is also expected to rise sharply. Michael Lynch, in a recent paper published in PNAS, suggested that the accumulation of deleterious mutuations will have a profound impact on members of industrialized societies within a few hundred years.3 He states: “Without a reduction in the germline transmission of deleterious mutations, the mean phenotypes of the residents of industrialized nations are likely to be rather different in just two or three centuries, with significant incapacitation at the morphological, physiological, and neurobiological levels.”
Continue reading "Human Extinction: Not the Worst Case Scenario"
Posted by Quinn O'Neill at 12:45 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (17)
A ramble through vowels and consonants
It’s probably unfashionable to say this, and it’s certainly a sign of a thoroughly colonized mind, but English is my favorite language. There are many reasons for this: the massive vocabulary, the puns, the double-streamed Germanic-Romance roots (so that ‘mistake’, ‘wood’ and ‘hue’ mean and evoke differently from ‘error’, ‘forest’ and ‘color’). But a large part of my affection for English lies in the sounds of the language.
This is a complicated thing to say about your first language. It’s much easier to know what a language sounds like when you don’t speak it, before comprehension has made the language transparent. It’s hard to reconstruct the way a language sounded before you learned it, and this is much more so if you grew up speaking it. Still, while some impressions are only available to a non-native speaker and others are irretrievably lost, others never leave or even wait to be discovered later on.
To me, the most striking thing about English is its diversity of vowels, something I only noticed after many years of speaking the language. English, in many dialects, has about 15 vowels (not counting diphtongs). Listen to the vowels through these words: a, kit, dress, trap, lot, strut, foot, bath, nurse, fleece, thought, goose, goat, north[1]. There are languages that have more (Germanic ones tend to be vowel rich), but there aren’t many of them, and none that I know well enough to frame a sentence in. And compare this vowel list to the relative paucity of vowels in so many other languages. Hindi really has only about 9 or 10 vowels; Bengali, which has lost several long-short distinctions has slightly fewer (though lots of diphtongs). Some languages (including these two) do include extra vowels formed by nasalizing existing ones; these nasalized vowels often sound lovely, but feel very similar to their base vowels. It’s more a flourish than a genuinely new creation. Japanese and Spanish have about 4 or 5 apiece, and I’m told that Mandarin and Arabic have about 6.
English, then, is capable of exceptionally rich assonance and exuberant plays on vowel sound[2]. Listen to the interplay between the ‘ai’ sound in ‘light’, ‘shines’, ‘tides’ and ‘file’ with the ‘o’ in ‘no’, ‘broken’, ‘ghosts’, ‘glow’ and ‘bones’, and notice the diverse vowel background they’re embedded in:
“Light breaks where no sun shines;
Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart
Push in their tides;
And, broken ghosts with glow-worms in their heads,
The things of light
File through the flesh where no flesh decks the bones.”
(From “Light breaks where no sun shines” – Dylan Thomas)
Continue reading "A ramble through vowels and consonants"
Posted by Rishidev Chaudhuri at 12:40 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (5)
Photography
I thought at first it was a bomb, but when I got up to the wreck I realised that the man had been speaking German, and it had been a ‘baum’ that had done for the car. It made more sense that it was a tree, as this road had been out of the fighting for days as far as I knew. (It also turned out that the dead guys were German, but I don’t suppose the Croat who told me changed the nationality of the tree on purpose.) Anyway, by the time I got there, they were just two pairs of feet sticking out from under a blanket and the tree was being cut up for logs. It must have happened about twenty minutes ago, because the people in the short traffic jam were already arguing. There was room to get a car round the wreck but not a lorry, and the drivers of the former were trying to get those of the latter to get out of the way. Someone in a blue serge uniform was shouting at everybody, including the dead Germans, and nobody was paying him any attention at all. He looked pretty old, and had no belt or epaulettes.
It was the guys from the village chopping up the tree who gave me the idea, because some of them began to turn their attention to the mangled car. They were the only ones there who seemed happy, and practical, and alive, and I like people like that. The thing to do was obviously to shunt the car off the road, where the rest of the useful bits of it could be best pirated and where it wouldn’t be blocking irate people with guns in their glove compartments.
It’s simple sign language to convey ‘move car from road into ditch’, and it was truly pleasing to see how easily an angry crowd can be transformed into a cooperative workforce when presented with a mission. It took less than a minute for ten of us to pick it up and manoeuvre it to the side, and without being asked several others kicked the debris after it. God knows who had pulled the Germans out and covered them up, but I’d lay money on the fact that no wallets or mobile phones will have been found on the bodies.
It was all smiles and laughter now, and someone even produced a bottle of slivovic. The man in uniform was still shouting occasionally, but as far as I could tell it was aimed even less specifically than before. I briefly wished I had my camera with me, because the sun had reappeared and was reflecting off the shards of the windscreen. It was shatterproof and had come off in one piece but in many pieces, stuck together by whatever they coat it with. Blood had filled all the little cracks, and the mid-afternoon sun danced and sparkled off the whole bits of glass, the tessera of the most beautiful mosaic I had ever seen.
But I realised that that sunny afternoon, that sudden comradeship, that tragedy for two families I had never met, that peculiar beauty – that is something a camera can never catch. Furthermore, the small new side to one’s character that such experiences create is young and impressionable, and readily lied to by photographs. I find most things are best left to memory, because even if you think you’ve forgotten something it’s usually in there somewhere, a problem of access not storage, sculpting the insides in subtle ways.
Posted by Simon Boas at 12:35 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
The Humanists: Jim Jarmusch's Night on Earth
On its surface, Night on Earth is nothing but people talking in taxicabs. The untold production hassle involved in this supposedly simple setup — towing gear, elaborate car-mounted lighting, routes to be driven and re-driven with each and every take — represents a truth about pretty much every Jim Jarmusch film: what doesn’t look like much in one sense turns out, in others, to actually be quite a lot. This holds especially true for for his choppier black-and-white pictures of the 1980s which, to the untrained eye, offered little more than slouchy characters walking, running, and standing around. Night on Earth is substantially glossier, in its own way, than those early projects, but it also manages to be more accessible than the even slicker productions that would follow. Purists might argue that, as penance, the movie has wound up as one of Jarmusch’s least seen; purists might argue that, but I won’t.
Whether intentionally or accidentally, Night on Earth proves difficult to write about without digging in the mothballs for a set of clichés tiring even to ponder. Taxicab stories force the lazy critic’s hand: if you don’t talk about the liminal state — the “non-place” — of such a temporary, disposable, rattly means of transit, you’ll probably talk about the distinctive short-term commercio-social dynamic between rider and driver. This is safer territory for a filmmaker like Jarmusch, whose deadly allergy to cliché demands that, for his own safety, he keep these risk factors at a distance. I assume the all-knowing, cigarette-bottomed, somehow unironically ironic deadpan stare of the 1970s NYC hipster by way of Akron scares them, as it would you or I.
Nevertheless, the forces of temperance seem to have come down just slightly harder on this film than on the rest of the Jarmusch canon. I consider it modern cinema’s loss, however slight, that Night on Earth lost its original title, Losangelesnewyorkparisromehelsinki. That word search, which contains the film’s five locations, wields the advantage of specificity, not to mention truth in advertising. Night, sure. Earth? Well, America’s biggest coastal cities, the two most romanticized ones in continental Europe, and one in, uh, Finland. It’s a point both for and against the movie that you wonder if Buenos Aires, Bombay, or Tokyo lay buried on a cutting room floor somewhere.
Each darkened city has its own cab, its own driver, and its own passengers; these form separate segments that, happily, share nothing else. It would have taken a certain art to tie all these vignettes together with common characters, incidents, or structures, but that’s not Jarmusch’s art. On the broadest level, each scene is about a different relationship between a cabbie and their fares, but these relationships are different enough that, in saying that, I’m not saying much of anything. Do I get any closer to the truth with the claim that that, in all five cities, Jarmusch harnesses the rich, creatively nourishing randomness generated by the matching of people in need of a ride with drivers in need of about fifteen bucks?
Continue reading "The Humanists: Jim Jarmusch's Night on Earth"
Posted by Colin Marshall at 12:30 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (1)
Nostalgia
Nostalgia, according to Webster's New World Dictionary1, is “a longing for something far away or long ago”. We all feel it, and it seems to play a larger role in our lives the older we get. Which makes perfect logical sense because the older we get the more we think about the “good old days”. Eventually there comes a point where there are more days in the past than in the future.2
I recently went with my wife and our two children to her high school reunion down in Centreville, Maryland. She graduated from Gunston Day School, class of 1985. I never had an experience like that when I was in high school (or college for that matter). Since Gunston at the time was a boarding school, my wife lived there during the school year and obviously went back home to New Jersey when summer came around. I never left home. I took the bus to high school, and I commuted to college. When we arrived at that reunion, I could feel that nostalgia even though I never went there. I could tell my wife had this sense of such joy from remembering all her best friends from high school. That was accompanied by a feeling that you can never get back to those days, the sadness, the brink of tears.
It's that mix that describes nostalgia for me.
Posted by Gabe DiNicola at 12:25 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
Trouble in a Heartland Town Hall
Michael Blim
Suddenly the blue below turns to white and gray. We pass over the last of Lake Michigan and begin our descent into O’Hare, crisscrossing the orderly Chicago street grid, former corn farm townships since divided into smaller squares still, each comprising a family or two. Past the countless brown lawns, now covered with snow we go, skidding just a bit on the tarmac where little ice flows glow in the landing lights.
My parents’ house is about six miles from the airport. We may have passed above it, but one square looks like every other at a couple of thousand feet. I had tried in vain to find the expressway junctures, but like houses from above, every cloverleaf looks like every other too. Even a big, but rare patch of forest preserves, an odd and invented site on the prairie, doesn’t help me figure where we were or what I might have seen.
Best to have stuck with “white and gray.” Topography is destiny, if only for this trip to America’s self-proclaimed heartland.
Wherever I go, I read newspapers, as many as I can find and even in languages I don’t know. It’s true that the papers in unknown languages are like those infernal English crosswords, number and nameless, and for me thus clueless. Still I hope that I’ll pick up something, remembering even now my one great coup when marooned on an Adriatic island I deduced from Croatian that Sadam Hussein had invaded Kuwait. Compulsions, it seems, require little reinforcement.
My father gets two papers at home, the Daily Herald, a town daily, and the Chicago Tribune. Giving my mother’s advancing Alzheimer’s disease, he only has time now to glance at them, choosing the editorials and op-ed pages over the rest. To me, it’s like he eats the wrong part of the chicken. I have plenty of opinions and a low opinion of the opinions of others. I prefer the facts, such as they are.
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Posted by Michael Blim at 12:20 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
Perceptions
Sughra Raza. Self-portrait with Guard. Hamburger Banhof Museum, Berlin. September, 2010.
Digital photograph.
Posted by Sughra Raza at 12:15 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (7)
An Open Letter to the National Punditry
Dear Esteemed Pundits of America,
The 2010 mid-term elections are behind us, and all the post-mortem analyses of the races are complete. Yet the 24/7 news cycle, and the corresponding demand for your incisive commentary, will not abate. So, what next? Will you turn your attention to the Congress and examine the ways in which the new House leadership clashes with President Obama? Will you look ahead to 2012 and offer odds on who will be the Republican nominee and how likely he or she is to defeat Obama? Will you continue to discuss the Tea Party in your ongoing attempt to discern who they are, what they want, and whether they matter? Will you investigate the gradual implementation of our healthcare bill and monitor the inevitable dissolution of DADT? Will you be able to sustain your interest in our increasingly quixotic military adventures? Or will you take up a cause you regard as underappreciated among the American people? These are all arguably worth your consideration. But we have a better idea: Resign from your job in broadcasting and run for public office.
We admit that this is a bold suggestion. Perhaps it has never occurred to you to seek political office. But consider how this course of action is required in light of the things you say and how you understand yourselves.
You take yourselves to be public figures committed to keeping the American government in check and on the right track. You offer daily commentary on national politics as a crucial contribution American democracy. You do not merely report the day’s news; indeed, many of you claim that you are not reporters at all. Rather, you claim to be commentators on the news, and you draw a sharp conceptual divide between yourselves and “the mainstream media.” We understand that you must insist on this distinction, for you take one of your central tasks to be that of exposing the media’s biases, distortions, and blind-spots. You understand your job to be that of helping the American citizenry to strip away propaganda, double-talk, and spin. You present the facts, and then you help the American people to understand what they mean. We’re thankful.
Continue reading "An Open Letter to the National Punditry "
Posted by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse at 12:10 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (7)
The Glasgow Boys: Pioneering Painters 1880-1900 - Royal Academy of Arts
Sue Hubbard
The rather amorphous group of artists known as The Glasgow Boys emerged at the end of the 1870s to reject Victorian sentimentalism, staid academicism and the execution of idyllic Highland landscapes in favour of painting scenes taken from everyday life. The first significant group of British artists since the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood they consisted of twenty young artists, including twelve key painters who took their ideas largely from European artistic models. Whilst the French Impressionists may have seemed a little too outré for their taste, they were attracted by the naturalism and realism of Jean-Francois Millet and by James McNeill Whistler’s austere and limited palette. Now the Royal Academy has mounted a major show of their work, billing them as ‘Pioneering Painters’. The first large-scale survey of the work of 'the Boys' to have been staged in London for 40 years it reveals, to a largely new audience, the work of James Paterson, William York Macgregor, James Guthrie and George Henry, together with younger painters such as John Lavery and Thomas Millie Dow, who were among the group’s leading figures. Though, sadly, the Royal Academy has only 80 out of the 130 included in the original version of the exhibition, which had a hugely successful run at Glasgow's Kelvingrove galleries earlier this year.
Condemned by some critics for a lack of originality and plagiarism (The Observer newspaper accused James Guthrie's opening painting A Funeral Service in the Highlands 1881-2 of being over reliant on Courbet's A Burial at Ornans 1849-50, in fact, what is interesting about this work, is how much it reflects the political mood that was sweeping Europe at the time, one that portrayed peasants and farmers in a sympathetic but unsentimental light. In atmosphere and composition Guthrie’s funeral is very similar to Fritz Mackensen’s Sermon on the Moor 1895, which shows a group of German Lutheran peasants dressed in their Sunday best, listening to an outdoor sermon. It is unlikely that Mackensen would have known Guthrie or Guthrie Mackensen, who lived in an artist’s community in Worpswede on the north German moors that counted the poet Rilke and the painter Paula Modersohn-Becker among its participants. Guthrie's work was actually inspired by a painting expedition to Brig o' Turk in the Trossachs. The dark, almost monochromatic canvas is based on a tragic, real life incident, an outdoor Presbyterian service held for a young boy who had drowned in the river during the artist’s stay. The weight of the community’s grief can be felt in the stooped stature of the men who surround the coffin under the metal-grey sky.
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Posted by Sue Hubbard at 12:05 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (1)
December 12, 2010
Anthropology, Science, and the AAA Long-Range Plan: What Really Happened
The American Anthropological Association at its annual meeting dropped the word “science” from its long-range plan. Daniel Lende, over at Neuroanthropology, discusses the change:
Nicholas Wade in the NY Times article Anthropology a Science? Statement Deepens a Rift has brought the controversy over the American Anthropological Association dropping “science” from its long-range plan back into the public eye.
The decision has reopened a long-simmering tension between researchers in science-based anthropological disciplines — including archaeologists, physical anthropologists and some cultural anthropologists — and members of the profession who study race, ethnicity and gender and see themselves as advocates for native peoples or human rights.
I already covered the controversy in my post Anthropology, Science and Public Understanding, where I also provide an up-to-date list of reactions to the controversy – including reactions to Wade’s NYT article. So look there for my points about the changes in the AAA long-range plan and the different takes anthropologists have had. Because today I want to provide a more accurate recounting of the controversy than Wade presents, and also defend anthropology.
Why Did the Controversy Explode? An Internal Process Gone Public
Nicholas Wade paints the explosion in light of the “bitter tribal warfare after the more politically active group attacked work on the Yanomamo people of Venezuela and Brazil by Napoleon Chagnon, a science-oriented anthropologist, and James Neel, a medical geneticist.”
This is not an apt reading of what actually happened. The issues that prompted this debate are both more mundane and more central to the present state of anthropology than some “tribal warfare” trope. Indeed, in the more than 50 reactions to the AAA decision, the el Dorado controversy has been a minor sidenote, when mentioned at all.
The blow-up over the dropping of “science” began as a two-step process: (1) a new document created through an internal process became public, and (2) initial reactions on the Internet fueled a broader controversy through polarizing takes on the meaning of that document.
Also see this statement from the AAA.
[H/t: Linta Varghese]
Posted by Robin Varghese at 03:35 PM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
The Tolstoy We’ve Forgotten
Anatoly Naiman in Moscow News:
On November 20, 1910 (November 7 by the old calendar), the 82-year-old Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy died at the obscure railway station of Astapovo. No death before or since has produced such a shock wave in Russia or such resonance throughout the world.
It is impossible to convey just what Tolstoy was. The closest you can come to it, if asked, would be to point a finger toward 100 or so volumes that make up his complete collected works and the memoirs people wrote about him: Read these, you might tell the inquirer, and things will be a little clearer.
But one thing is already clear, actually – that there is no answer to who Tolstoy was, and there can’t be, in principle. Dealing with Tolstoy is like dealing with a concept on the order of life, earth, or mankind: no matter how closely you examine it or try to stretch your imagination around it, the only thing you understand completely is that you can’t fit it into a formula.
Or put it this way: modernity can’t cope without the irrational value of Pi, which trails off elusively into numerical infinity. The more you read Tolstoy, and the more you read about Tolstoy, the more obvious his Pi-ness – his infinite and elusive nature – becomes.
The best at writing about Tolstoy were Maxim Gorky, Vladimir Korolenko and Alexander Kuprin, largely because they were major figures themselves; as such they were big enough to understand that the lesser are not given scales by which to measure the greater. But they could, and did, find a point from which they could observe him, both in his human simplicity and in the complexity of his spirit at a given moment.
The worst at describing him were the ideologists – including, alas, the Tolstoyans themselves. My father was a Tolstoyan (not one of the “professionals”, happily) who in 1920, as a member of the Tolstoyan community at Taininka, in the Moscow region, served the time in Butyrka prison required of those who refused to enter the military in those days. So for me Tolstoy was from childhood a sort of distant relative, a mysterious, not entirely real uncle.
Posted by Robin Varghese at 02:53 PM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
Tough Love and Revelation: The Films of Frederick Wiseman
Andrew Delbanco in the NYRB blog:
The first film by Frederick Wiseman I saw was Titicut Follies (1967). It was the fall of 1969, my freshman year of college, too long ago to trust my memory scene by scene. What I mainly remember is the festive mood in the dining-hall-turned-theater as the lights went down and latecomers ducked under the projector’s cone of bluish light as they made their way to sit with friends across the room. A very cool senior had made introductory remarks to the effect that what we were about to see had been “banned in Boston” (always promising), and I think we half-expected the local police to show up as if we had gathered in Rick’s gambling den in Casablanca (1942). I remember a little snickering during the opening pan across the expressionless faces of the inmates singing “Strike up the Band” while they wave—tentatively, almost spastically—their pompoms. But once the film started, there was only silence in the room, interrupted now and then by a gasp.
A few months ago, forty years older, I watched Titicut Follies on a DVD on my computer screen in my study at home. Memories of that first viewing came flooding back: the guards tormenting an inmate named Jim, marching him naked up and down the bright-lit hallways, peppering him with variations on one relentless question: “How’s that room, Jim? … You gonna keep that room clean, Jim? … How’s that room gonna be tomorrow, Jim? … How come it’s not clean today?” until he screams out his compliance in rage and helplessness. And then there was the German psychiatrist who looks for all the world like Hermann Goring, pestering an inmate with questions in a monotone voice about how often he masturbates. Did he feel guilty after raping his own child? “I need help but I don’t know where I can get it,” says the young man, handsome and fit, but with a deadness in his eyes. “You get it here, I guess,” says the doctor—help, as the rest of the film makes clear, in the form of lockdowns, hosings, strip searches, and assorted other humiliations...
Watching the film today is an utterly different experience. I see images of Abu Ghraib. I see failed men exposed to mockery for having failed, men who once had families and jobs and respectable credentials, but, unable to manage their sexual or violent urges, descended into the pit into which any of us might fall.
Posted by Robin Varghese at 02:36 PM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
Evidence-based Policy: Where is Our Theory of Evidence?
Nancy Cartwright, Andrew Goldfinch and Jeremy Howick in Journal of Children's Services:
What is it in virtue of which a fact is evidence for a hypothesis? Our philosophical accounts fall into two categories. First are accounts based on some features of the probabilistic relations between the evidence and the hypothesis – for example, increase in probability or various functions of likelihoods (see Mayo, 1996 Chapter 3 for an overview of such positions). These are not useful for evidence-based policy. What we need is a concept of evidence that we can use to judge whether some fact should be taken into consideration – whether it should be ‘on the table’ for consideration. Then we would expect to look at all the evidence on the table to decide on the probability of the proposed policy claim. Concepts of evidence based on facts about probabilities put the cart before the horse. We need a concept that can give guidance about what is relevant to consider in deciding on the probability of the hypothesis not one that requires that we already know significant facts about the probability of the hypothesis on various pieces of evidence.
Second are those accounts that are based on facts about explanation – for example, versions of inference to the best explanation (Lipton, 2004) or explanatory connectedness (Achinstein, 2001). The problem here is the concept of explanation. A good many accounts end up explaining explanation by reference to probability relations between the ‘explanans’ [the means of making plain] and the ‘explanandum’ [that which is being made plain]. This simply recreates the previous problem.
Posted by Robin Varghese at 02:09 PM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
Rebalancing Drug Policy
Over at The Nation, Ethan Nadelmann, Marc Mauer, Bruce Western, Tracy Velázquez, David Cole, and Laura Carlsen in a forum discuss the war on drugs. Western:
Drugs are intensively criminalized among the poor but largely unregulated among the rich. The pot, coke and ecstasy that enliven college dorms, soothe the middle-class time bind and ignite the octane of capitalism on Wall Street are unimpeded by the street sweep, the prison cell and the parole-mandated urine tests that are routine in poor neighborhoods.
The drug war is nitro to the ghetto's glycerin. In neighborhoods of mass unemployment, family breakdown and untreated addiction, punitive drug policy (and its sibling, the war on crime) has outlawed large tracts of everyday life. By 2008 one in nine black men younger than 35 was in prison or jail. Among black male dropouts in their mid-30s, an astonishing 60 percent have served time in state or federal prison.
The reach of the penal system extends beyond the prison population to families and communities. There are now 2.7 million children with a parent in prison or jail. There are 1.2 million African-American children with incarcerated parents (one in nine), and more than half of those parents were convicted of a drug or other nonviolent offense.
In the absence of any serious effort to improve economic opportunity, particularly among young men with little schooling, drug control has become our surrogate social policy. For all the billions spent on draconian criminalization, addiction remains a scourge of the disadvantaged in inner cities and small towns, drugs are still plentiful and the drug trade remains a ready but risky source of casual employment for low-education men and women with no legitimate prospects. Though drugs are at the center of an array of serious social problems in low-income communities, things are made worse by a dysfunctional policy in which arrest, imprisonment and a criminal record have become a normal part of life.
Posted by Robin Varghese at 01:56 PM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (3)
A Naturalistic Ontology for Mechanistic Explanations in the Social Sciences
Dan Sperber over at his website, also forthcoming in Pierre Demeulenaere, ed., Analytical sociology and social mechanisms:
There are several approaches in the social sciences that seek to provide causal explanations of social phenomena neither in terms of general causal laws nor in terms of case-specific narratives, but, at a middle level of generality, in terms of recurrent causal patterns or “mechanisms” (Hedström & Swedberg 1988). Typically, these approaches invoke micro-mechanisms to explain macro social phenomena. Most of them, ‘analytical sociology’ in particular (Hedström 2005), are versions or offshoots of methodological individualism. These individualistic approaches either stick to the “methodological” in “methodological individualism” and leave aside ontological issues, or else they are also individualistic in the metaphysical sense and deny the existence of supra-individual social phenomena that cannot be analysed in terms of the aggregation of individual actions (see Ruben 1985).
The ontological challenge to which individualism responds is that presented by holistic approaches that place the social on a supra-individual level of reality. Another possible challenge, coming not from above but from below, that is, from the natural sciences, is generally not considered. The individuals invoked in individualism are not so much the individual organisms recognised in biology as the individual agents recognised in commonsense ontology. Individual agency is taken as a primitive in this approach, rather than as a tentative construct that should be unpacked and possibly questioned by psychology and biology.
Most mechanistic approaches, whether their individualism is just methodological or also metaphysical, show little interest in providing the social sciences with a naturalistic ontology, that is, one continuous with that of the natural science. The main goal of this chapter is to outline such a naturalistic ontology. But why should we want such an ontology in the first place? I don’t, by the way, believe that the social sciences in general should systematically work within naturalistic ontology: many of their goals, concern and programs are better pursued with the usual commonsense ontology. But when it comes to providing a scientific causal explanation of social phenomena, there are at least two reasons to prefer a naturalistic approach. The first reason is trivial: To the extent that it is possible, we would prefer our understanding of the world to be integrated, both for the sake of generality and for that of coherence.
The second, more interesting reason to want a naturalistic ontology has to do with the quality of our causal explanations. Either the laws of physics admit of exception and social events provides such exceptions (and there is a Nobel Prize in physics to be won by doing sociology!), or else whatever has causal powers in the universe at large and among humans on earth in particular has them in virtue of its physical properties. Of course, this does not mean that social scientists should get involved in the physics of social causality. What it does mean though is that, when we attribute causal powers to some social phenomena, we should be able to describe it in such terms that its physical character is not a total mystery but raises a set of sensible questions that can be passed on to neighbouring natural sciences, psychology, biology, and ecology in particular, that directly or indirectly do ground their understanding of causal powers in physics.
Posted by Robin Varghese at 01:22 PM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (2)
gloomy sunday
Posted by Morgan Meis at 09:42 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (1)
gloomy sunday
Posted by Morgan Meis at 09:41 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (1)
gloomy sunday
Posted by Morgan Meis at 09:41 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
monsters
We fill absences. This is what we do. Nature has her way of filling up absence with stars, atoms, frogs, dirt, human beings. Human beings, though, have their own curious way of filling absence. When we lived in caves, we filled the vacuum of the unknown with fear. In ancient times, gods filled the unknown. In 16th-century Europe, the artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo filled the unknown with monsters. In the darkened rooms of the “Arcimboldo, 1526-1593: Nature and Fantasy” exhibit at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., hang strange and unwholesome monster faces. The portraits lining the walls are a perversion of everything we consider to be natural and right and harmonious about the human visage. In Arcimboldo’s “composite heads,” men are made of candlesticks and gourds and fish and sticks. Arcimboldo also created invertible paintings that, when held over a mirror, show two totally different images. You might think you’re looking at a metal bowl filled with assorted vegetables, except when you hold it over a mirror — reverso! — it’s now a fat guy with thick mushroom lips and a turnip beard sporting a metal bowl for a hat. The exhibition’s signature portrait is “Vertumnus,” the Roman god of the seasons. Like Arcimboldo’s other composite portraits, Vertumnus is something of a riddle, a funny tribute to his benefactor, Emperor Rudolph II. It portrays Rudolph as Vertumnus, as the harvest itself. The face of Rudolph/Vertumnus has nothing human about it save the form — no flesh, no blood, no bones. It is composed entirely of fruits and vegetables. A long pear nose dangles over cherry lips. Root vegetables and gourds arrange a neck and chest, which are adorned with flowers, an artichoke, and a cabbage.more from Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set here.
Posted by Morgan Meis at 09:23 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (3)
Sunday Poem
Nettie Moore
Lost John sitting on a railroad track
Something's out of wack
Blues this morning falling down like hail
Gonna leave a greasy trail
Gonna travel the world is what I'm gonna do
Then come back and see you
All I ever do is struggle and strive
If I don't do anybody any harm, I might make it back home alive
I'm the oldest son of a crazy man
I'm in a cowboy band
Got a pile of sins to pay for and I ain't got time to hide
I'd walk through a blazing fire, baby, if I knew you was on the other side
Oh, I miss you Nettie Moore
And my happiness is o'er
Winter's gone, the river's on the rise
I loved you then and ever shall
But there's no one here that's left to tell
The world has gone black before my eyes
The world of research has gone berserk
Too much paperwork
Albert's in the graveyard, Frankie's raising hell
I'm beginning to believe what the scriptures tell
I'm going where the Southern crosses the Yellow Dog
Get away from these demagogues
And these bad luck women stick like glue
It's either one or the other or neither of the two
She says, "look out daddy, don't want you to tear your pants.
You can get wrecked in this dance."
They say whiskey will kill ya, but I don't think it will
I'm riding with you to the top of the hill
Oh, I miss you Nettie Moore
And my happiness is o'er
Winter's gone, the river's on the rise
I loved you then and ever shall
But there's no one here that's left to tell
The world has gone black before my eyes
Don't know why my baby never looked so good before
I don't have to wonder no more
She been cooking all day and it's gonna take me all night
I can't eat all that stuff in a single bite
The Judge is coming in, everybody rise
Lift up your eyes
You can do what you please, you don't need my advice
Before you call me any dirty names you better think twice
Getting light outside, the temperature dropped
I think the rain has stopped
I'm going to make you come to grips with fate
When I'm through with you, you'll learn to keep your business straight
Oh, I miss you Nettie Moore
And my happiness is o'er
Winter's gone, the river's on the rise
I loved you then and ever shall
But there's no one here that's left to tell
The world has gone black before my eyes
The bright spark of the steady lights
Has dimmed my sights
When you're around all my grief gives 'way
A lifetime with you is like some heavenly day
Everything I've ever known to be right has proven wrong
I'll be drifting along
The woman I'm lovin', she rules my heart
No knife could ever cut our love apart
Today I'll stand in faith and raise
The voice of praise
The sun is strong, I'm standing in the light
I wish to God that it were night
Oh, I miss you Nettie Moore
And my happiness is o'er
Winter's gone, the river's on the rise
I loved you then and ever shall
But there's no one here that's left to tell
The world has gone black before my eyes
by Bob Dylan
from Modern Times
Copyright © 2006 by Special Rider Music
The Little White Cottage by Marshall S. Pike
Posted by Jim Culleny at 08:10 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
Mistresses: A History of the Other Woman
From The Telegraph:
Diana, Princess of Wales, was lucky to have only three people in her marriage; King Solomon needed 300 mistresses to keep him happy. Married life might be less crowded today than it was at the start of the previous millennium, but the mistress has by no means disappeared. In Mistresses, Elizabeth Abbott looks at 80 'other women’, from Greek concubines to Camilla Parker Bowles, and asks why they chose to live in the margins of someone else’s life. We all know what men get out of the deal, but what’s in it for the mistress?
The answer is usually money. Financial support is 'integral to mistressdom, indeed one of its most attractive features’. The late Sir James Goldsmith observed that a man who marries his mistress creates a vacancy: mistressdom is a profession, replete with perks, promotions and – all being well – a pension. For 40 years, Marion Davies was swathed in mink and doused in champagne by the newspaper mogul William Randolph Hearst, who kept his wife on the east coast and his mistress on the west coast. 'May I be a mother to you?’ he asked Marion. She would have preferred him to be a husband, but settled for calling him 'daddy’ instead.
More here.
Posted by Azra Raza at 07:22 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (1)
Study reveals 'secret ingredient' in religion that makes people happier
From PhysOrg:
"Our study offers compelling evidence that it is the social aspects of religion rather than theology or spirituality that leads to life satisfaction," said Chaeyoon Lim, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who led the study. "In particular, we find that friendships built in religious congregations are the secret ingredient in religion that makes people happier." In their study, "Religion, Social Networks, and Life Satisfaction," Lim and co-author Robert D. Putnam, the Malkin Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University, use data from the Faith Matters Study, a panel survey of a representative sample of U.S. adults in 2006 and 2007. The panel survey was discussed in detail in the recently published book American Grace by Putnam and David E. Campbell.
According to the study, 33 percent of people who attend religious services every week and have three to five close friends in their congregation report that they are "extremely satisfied" with their lives. "Extremely satisfied" is defined as a 10 on a scale ranging from 1 to 10.
More here.
Posted by Azra Raza at 07:15 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (2)
December 11, 2010
A Matter of Optics
Warren Breckman in Lapham's Quarterly:
In the evening, “with the odor of the elephants after the rain and the sandalwood ashes growing cold in the braziers,” Kublai Khan despairs of ever knowing or understanding the empire he has built. And in the dusk, the Venetian Marco Polo tells the great Khan of the unknown cities he rules. So begins Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, that mystifying, illuminating, bedazzling compendium of fantastical places. Among these imagined cities, Polo tells the emperor of Irene. “Irene is the city visible when you lean out from the edge of the plateau at the hour when the lights come on, and in the limpid air, the pink of the settlement can be discerned spread out in the distance below…Those who look down from the heights conjecture about what is happening in the city; they wonder if it would be pleasant or unpleasant to be in Irene that evening. Not that they have any intention of going there (in any case the roads winding down to the valley are bad), but Irene is a magnet for the eyes and thoughts of those who stay up above.”
People love vantage points from which they can take in the city. Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary does not observe Rouen from the street, but from a hilltop, where seen from above, “the whole landscape had the static quality of a painting.” William Wordsworth paused on Westminster Bridge in 1802 to observe London laid out before him:
This city now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theaters, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.Tall towers have always delighted, because they provide such visions of the city spread out before the gaze. Where towers or hills failed, medieval or Renaissance painters imagined the city from on high, in a celestial view that no human eye had yet achieved. Technology eventually caught up to this desire. A straight line can be drawn from Félix Nadar’s first aerial photographs of Paris taken from his balloon in 1858 to my ability to google views of my city, my house, or my backyard from outer space.
The god’s-eye perspective is the ultimate expression of the human desire to make the city visible, to see it in a glance, to read it as an intelligible and unified object of human making. Yet, as Marco Polo tells Kublai Khan, those on the plateau cannot know Irene, for, “If you saw it, standing in its midst, it would be a different city; Irene is a name for a city in the distance, and if you approach, it changes.”
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Theory of Technology
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The Arab World’s Silent Feminist Revolution
Gema Martin Munoz in Project Syndicate:
Consider Arab women. The predominant image is of a passive, exotic, and veiled victim-woman who reacts to events instead of actively participating in them. She is an impersonal object of communal stereotypes that sustain cultural prejudices.
In fact, Arab societies are engaged in a process of immense and irreversible change in which women are playing a crucial role. During the last half-century, intense urbanization and feminization of the workforce in all Arab countries has propelled women into the public arena on a massive scale.
During this period, differences in schooling levels between boys and girls have lessened everywhere – though at different speeds. Indeed, in many Arab countries, more girls than boys are now in secondary and higher education, which shows that parents consider their daughters’ education to be just as important as that of their sons. And all surveys show that young men and women want to study and have a job before they marry. (Moreover, they increasingly want to choose their own partner.)
At the same time, demographic shifts, along with social and economic factors affecting education and work, are forcing profound change on the traditional model of the Arab family. Higher ages for marriage and declining fertility – resulting directly from widening use of artificial contraception – are reducing family size to something much closer to the “nuclear families” of the West. The Maghreb region may lead in this regard, but the phenomenon is observable throughout the Arab world, even in the most rigidly conservative states.
This new family model has gained so much force that it is imposing itself on rural society, too, where the decline of the agrarian economy is accompanied by a strong shift towards smaller families. This change is occurring at slightly different speeds across the Arab world, but often it is occurring simultaneously in town and country.
Not surprisingly, these changes have led to a redistribution of power between old and young – and between men and women.
Posted by Robin Varghese at 12:31 PM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (1)
twombly
Cy Twombly is a painter of thinking aloud, of thoughts checked and then resumed, hesitancies and the rush of ideas. Twombly, now 82, is the great survivor of the heroic age of American painting, the generation of Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Jackson Pollock, who upended what was expected in contemporary art. Somehow he has managed to continue to create profoundly affecting work without histrionics or hubris. Twombly is known for his scribbles, great looping calligraphies of white on black, of white on white – or, in the more recent Bacchus series, swoops of carmine three metres high. His paintings are a mass of marks, erasures and words. Phrases come and go, lines are repeated until they become incantatory. Sometimes you read a fragmentary part of a poem, or an allusion to a classical text, only for it to be crossed out. There are puns and odd misspellings: erudition giving way to doodling at the back of the class. And this is what I love: the way that there is slippage between an intended epic expression and a failure to finish.In his work he has both the shopping list and the great list of ships sent to attack Troy.more from Edmund de Waal at The Guardian here.
Posted by Morgan Meis at 09:09 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
genius
At the age of 14, in 1846, James Clark Maxwell published his first scientific paper in a learned journal, having already seen his poetry printed in the Edinburgh Courant. In 1864, he went on to write the classic A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field, which gave a unified account of electricity, magnetism and light in just four equations. Einstein later remarked that he stood on the shoulders of not Newton but Maxwell. Almost everyone would agree that Maxwell was a genius. But what exactly does this mean? In the popular imagination, geniuses are a breed apart. They are capable of insights or artistic creations that no amount of training and effort could produce in mere ordinary folk. You can squander your genius or fail to fulfil it but, ultimately, you either have it at birth or you don’t. Four new books about genius all interrogate this powerful myth. At the very least, they show that the soil in which genius grows matters at least as much as the seed, which is why particular cultures produce particular types of genius at particular times in history. This is the implicit message of Peter Watson’s The German Genius and Robert Uhlig’s Genius of Britain, which look at collective as well as individual brilliance. In Sudden Genius? Andrew Robinson goes further in undermining the myths of genius, suggesting that virtually none of the common-sense ideas we have about it stack up. And in The Genius in All of Us, David Shenk claims the idea that genius is dispensed at birth is still based on discredited genetics.more from Julian Baggini at the FT here.
Posted by Morgan Meis at 08:54 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (1)
a desperate nomadic quality
"I am submitting the enclosed short story 'LIFE-LINE' for either 'Astounding' or 'Unknown,'" Robert A. Heinlein wrote to editor John Campbell in 1939, "because I am not sure which policy it fits the better." The former magazine published science fiction, the latter fantasy. Heinlein's short story — the first he had attempted professionally, at age 31 — concerns a machine that can predict when a person will die. That he sold this neophyte production, on first submission, to a top pulp editor (kicking off an intense friendship and correspondence) is exciting in and of itself. Heinlein's uncertainty about to which slice of genre this story belonged is an ironic and humanizing detail, given what a titan Heinlein would become as the author of everything from juvenile SF in character-building Horatio Alger mode to the counterculture touchstone "Stranger in a Strange Land" (1961).more from Ed Park at the LA Times here.
Posted by Morgan Meis at 08:29 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
Iftar at Isabelle’s
Ian Bassingthwaighte in Guernica:
All that remains are pitted dates. Everything else has been eaten. The plates have been licked and the glasses emptied. Residue lingers on the table: dirty napkins, forgotten forks, leftover crumbs and morsels, plastic water bottles. “Would you pray more if I left you?” I ask Isabelle, a Cairo native and the girl of my dreams. She pretends to be religious, but I don’t mind because she’s pretty when her head’s pressed to the floor.
“Probably,” she says. “Are you going to?”
“Not yet,” I say.
Wendell laughs, but I don’t think it’s funny.
Wendell is a fat man with a twisted wit and he wants to fuck my lover more than I do. He is the best friend I have and I would loathe to lose him. He has a glass in his hand and he raises it. I raise mine. Isabelle raises the entire bottle and we drink until the room spins faster than the Earth does, which makes us dizzy and prone to tipping. We go outside and into the city, which is a messy conglomerate of heat and waste. We would breathe air if there were any, but instead there are varieties of emissions and so we breathe those instead. We dodge speeding vehicles as we meander blindly across highways and side streets. Isabelle whispers a prayer at each crossing. She says it for all of us so that we won’t get splattered. One street short of the Nile, a cat scrambles across the road and is squished halfway to the other side by a bus. Then I mimic the cat and scramble too, but I make it. Divine intervention or slop-fed luck, I don’t know which. But I’m the winner this time and I celebrate by cheering.
More here.
Posted by Azra Raza at 07:38 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
Working on the Ending
Gail Godwin in The New York Times:
When you’re a young writer, you subtract the birth dates of authors from their publication dates and feel panic or hope. When you’re an old writer, you observe the death dates of your favorite writers and you reflect on their works and their lives. This past year I outlived Henry James, who died two months short of his 73rd birthday. In his final years, he wrote an autobiography of his childhood, befriended badly wounded World War I soldiers and changed his citizenship. I have catapulted myself out of many writing setbacks and humiliations with the rallying cry of the dying novelist Dencombe, in James’s story “The Middle Years”: “We work in the dark — we do what we can — we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task.” The words have the stride of a march and the echo of a mantra. Already I have missed being able to ask James, “When you were my age, what did you do when . . . ?”
“How does what you want out of writing change with age?” Terry Gross asked Philip Roth on NPR’s “Fresh Air” in October. Roth, 77, told her it hadn’t changed much for him. He wanted to be as alert and energetic as ever at the keyboard, he wanted to be taken seriously, and he wanted to make a work of art out of his subject. You want to be taken seriously; that doesn’t change. What has changed for me is the degree of compromise I am willing to inflict on my work in order to see it in print. As a young writer, I was told by the fiction editor at Esquire that he’d publish my story if I took out the woman’s dreams. I took them out. “It will make her more inscrutable,” he promised, chuckling. It certainly did. Forty years later, “A Sorrowful Woman” is my most anthologized story, and I get regular e-mails from bewildered high school and college students asking why this woman did what she did.
More here.
Posted by Azra Raza at 07:04 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
December 10, 2010
WikiLeaky Power, or The Dark Side of Internet Freedom
First, Pierre Buhler in Project Syndicate:
In the late 1980’s, glasnost – transparency – was one of the nails in the coffin of the Soviet Union. While WikiLeaks has certainly not had a similar effect, it epitomizes the extent of the individual’s empowerment in a networked world. All that was necessary to challenge the world’s mightiest power, after all, was a disgruntled US Army intelligence analyst, some hacking knowledge, a few computers, and a handful of determined activists enrolled under the contested banner of transparency.
At the time she was named Director of Policy Planning at the US State Department, Anne-Marie Slaughter, a respected scholar of international affairs, boldly heralded the advent of a networked world. “War, diplomacy, business, media, society…are networked,” she wrote in Foreign Affairs in January 2009, and “in this world, the measure of power is connectedness.” Having the greatest potential for connectivity, America has the edge in a “networked century.”
This drive prompted US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in January 2010 to proclaim the “freedom to connect” as the cyber-equivalent of the more familiar freedoms of assembly or expression. Of course, Clinton added, these technologies are not an unmitigated blessing, and can be misused for darker purposes. But her list of the potential abuses of the connected world contained nothing similar to the WikiLeaks storm.
That storm will leave behind no trace of understanding if it is assessed in isolation, rather than as part of a broader pattern. WikiLeaks’ latest release demonstrates that the transformation of power by the “digital revolution” could be as far-reaching as that brought about by the fifteenth-century printing revolution. In this game, where new players invite themselves, the edge goes to agility and innovation.
Second, Evgeny Morozov in The Christian Science Monitor:
Continue reading " WikiLeaky Power, or The Dark Side of Internet Freedom "
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The Crisis of the American Intellectual
Walter Russell Mead in The National Interest (h/t: Boston Review):
[T]he biggest roadblock today is that so many of America’s best-educated, best-placed people are too invested in old social models and old visions of history to do their real job and help society transition to the next level. Instead of opportunities they see threats; instead of hope they see danger; instead of the possibility of progress they see the unraveling of everything beautiful and true.
Too many of the very people who should be leading the country into a process of renewal that would allow us to harness the full power of the technological revolution and make the average person incomparably better off and more in control of his or her own destiny than ever before are devoting their considerable talent and energy to fighting the future.
I’m overgeneralizing wildly, of course, but there seem to be three big reasons why so many intellectuals today are so backward looking and reactionary.
First, there’s ideology. Since the late nineteenth century most intellectuals have identified progress with the advance of the bureaucratic, redistributionist and administrative state. The government, guided by credentialed intellectuals with scientific training and values, would lead society through the economic and political perils of the day. An ever more powerful state would play an ever larger role in achieving ever greater degrees of affluence and stability for the population at large, redistributing wealth to provide basic sustenance and justice to the poor. The social mission of intellectuals was to build political support for the development of the new order, to provide enlightened guidance based on rational and scientific thought to policymakers, to administer the state through a merit based civil service, and to train new generations of managers and administrators. The modern corporation was supposed to evolve in a similar way, with business becoming more stable, more predictable and more bureaucratic.
Most American intellectuals today are still shaped by this worldview and genuinely cannot imagine an alternative vision of progress. It is extremely difficult for such people to understand the economic forces that are making this model unsustainable and to see why so many Americans are in rebellion against this kind of state and society – but if our society is going to develop we have to move beyond the ideas and the institutions of twentieth century progressivism.
Posted by Robin Varghese at 12:41 PM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (7)
Tea’d Off
Christopher Hitchens in Vanity Fair:
It is often in the excuses and in the apologies that one finds the real offense. Looking back on the domestic political “surge” which the populist right has been celebrating since last month, I found myself most dispirited by the manner in which the more sophisticated conservatives attempted to conjure the nasty bits away.
Here, for example, was Ross Douthat, the voice of moderate conservatism on the New York Times op-ed page. He was replying to a number of critics who had pointed out that Glenn Beck, in his rallies and broadcasts, had been channeling the forgotten voice of the John Birch Society, megaphone of Strangelovian paranoia from the 1950s and 1960s. His soothing message:
These parallels are real. But there’s a crucial difference. The Birchers only had a crackpot message; they never had a mainstream one. The Tea Party marries fringe concerns (repeal the 17th Amendment!) to a timely, responsible-seeming message about spending and deficits.
The more one looks at this, the more wrong it becomes (as does that giveaway phrase “responsible-seeming”). The John Birch Society possessed such a mainstream message—the existence of a Communist world system with tentacles in the United States—that it had a potent influence over whole sections of the Republican Party. It managed this even after its leader and founder, Robert Welch, had denounced President Dwight D. Eisenhower as a “dedicated, conscious agent” of that same Communist apparatus. Right up to the defeat of Barry Goldwater in 1964, and despite the efforts of such conservatives as William F. Buckley Jr. to dislodge them, the Birchers were a feature of conservative politics well beyond the crackpot fringe.
Now, here is the difference. Glenn Beck has not even been encouraging his audiences to reread Robert Welch. No, he has been inciting them to read the work of W. Cleon Skousen, a man more insane and nasty than Welch and a figure so extreme that ultimately even the Birch-supporting leadership of the Mormon Church had to distance itself from him. It’s from Skousen’s demented screed The Five Thousand Year Leap (to a new edition of which Beck wrote a foreword, and which he shoved to the position of No. 1 on Amazon) that he takes all his fantasies about a divinely written Constitution, a conspiratorial secret government, and a future apocalypse. To give you a further idea of the man: Skousen’s posthumously published book on the “end times” and the coming day of rapture was charmingly called The Cleansing of America. A book of his with a less repulsive title, The Making of America, turned out to justify slavery and to refer to slave children as “pickaninnies.” And, writing at a time when the Mormon Church was under attack for denying full membership to black people, Skousen defended it from what he described as this “Communist” assault.
Posted by Robin Varghese at 12:38 PM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (1)
All Of Humanity
Alan A. Stone in The Boston Review:
For centuries after Shakespeare wrote King Lear, interpreters refused to accept the play’s desolation and lack of redemption. Nahum Tate gave it a happy ending in 1691, and for 200 years a redeemed Lear and the Earl of Gloucester would peacefully retire while their good children, Cordelia and Edgar, marry and rule a unified Britain. As late as the start of the twentieth century, preeminent Shakespeare scholar A. C. Bradley lectured that Lear had reached transcendence through his suffering and died happy. Even though the play contains the bleakest line in all of Shakespeare—Lear’s “Never, never, never, never, never,” as he holds his daughter’s dead body in his arms—Bradley insisted on a Christian moral to the story.
Today King Lear is recognized as the greatest tragedy in the English language, less brilliant than Hamlet but more profound and prophetic: “Humanity,” the Duke of Albany laments, “must perforce prey on itself, Like monsters of the deep.” There is no god or justice in the pre-Christian world that Shakespeare invented for Lear. Stanley Cavell’s justly famous essay “The Avoidance of Love” captures the paradox of Lear for modern audiences. “We can only learn through suffering” but have “nothing to learn from it,” he writes.
Stalin’s reign of terror, Hitler’s concentration camps, and the atomic bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki gave philosophers, literary critics, and theater directors a context for understanding Shakespeare’s grim text. Even so, actors and directors remained puzzled by Lear. Lear himself asks in Act I, “Does any here know me?” Was he already senile before he divided up his kingdom in exchange for public professions of love from his three daughters, or was he driven mad by the consequences of his rash decision as he realized that the two daughters who professed so much love and devotion—Goneril and Regan—now ruled over him? Regan and her husband, the Duke of Cornwall, lock Lear out of Gloucester’s home, and leave him in a terrible storm. “Blow winds and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow! You cataracts and hurricanes, spout till you have drenched out steeples,” he cries. But there is also pathos, “Here I stand your slave, a poor, infirm, weak and despised old man.” Lear is at once emotionally transparent and unable to acknowledge what he has done—“Who is it that can tell me who I am?” he wonders.
Over the past four decades some of the world’s most eminent film directors and actors have attempted an answer to Lear’s question. Among them are the Soviet Russian Grigori Kozintsev with the Estonian actor Jüri Järvet as Lear, and Britain’s Peter Brook with Paul Scofield—both productions from 1971. On television, Michael Elliott and Laurence Olivier tackled Lear in 1983, and Trevor Nunn and Ian McKellen tried their hand in 2008. And there are many others, including Akira Kurosawa, whose Ran is an Edo-period interpretation in which three sons replace Lear’s daughters.
None of these films give us the definitive answer to Lear’s question.
Posted by Robin Varghese at 12:36 PM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (5)
Consciousness on the Page: A Primer on the Novels of Nicholson Baker
Colin Marshall in The Millions:
1. Telepathy on a budget
If you don’t know Nicholson Baker as an intensive describer of everyday minutiae, surely you know him as an intensive describer of goofy sexual fantasy. At the very least, you might hold the broad notion that he’s very, very detail-oriented. None of those images capture the novelist in full, but if you twist them into a feedback loop by their common roots, you’ll get closer to the reality. Whatever the themes at hand, Baker adheres with utter faith to his narrators’ internal monologues, carefully following every turn, loop, and kink (as it were) in their trains of thought. He understands how often people think about sex, but he also understands that, often times, they just think about shoelaces — and he understands those thoughts of sex and shoelaces aren’t as far apart, in form or in content, as they might at first seem.
This is why some find Baker’s novels uniquely dull, irritating, or repulsive, and why others place them in the small league of books that make sense. Not “sense” in that they comprise understandable sentences, paragraphs, and chapters; the existential kind of sense. So many novels exude indifference to their medium, as though they could just as easily have been — or are merely slouching around before being turned into — movies, comics, or interpretive dances. The Baker novel is long-form text on the page as well, but it’s also long-form text at its core, and on every level in between. Adapting it into anything else would be a ludicrous project at best and an inconceivable one at worst; you might as well “adapt” a boat into a goat.
Baker lays out certain clues to the effectiveness — or if you’re on the other side, ineffectiveness — of his concept of the novel in the texts themselves. Brazen, perhaps, but awfully convenient.
Posted by Robin Varghese at 12:33 PM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
Friday Poem
When the Tower of Babel was built we began to speak in tongues, which was confusing
at first and set us at odds with each other. But then we remembered that behind the
babble everything remained one, though now we had so many more ways to say "thing"!
But we're still confused.
--Roshi Bob
How many?
Australia, a group of girls at a corroboree
Lapland, reindeer herdgirls
China, the "yaktail"
Greece, the seven daughters, sisters,
or "the sailing stars"
a cluster of faint stars in Taurus,
the Pleiades,
name of a car in Japan —
Subaru
in Mayan —A fistful of boys —
by Gary Snyder
from Danger on Peaks
Posted by Jim Culleny at 08:17 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
Mice created from two dads
From MSNBC:
Reproductive scientists have used stem cell technology to create mice from two dads. The breakthrough could be a boon to efforts to save endangered species -- and the procedure could make it possible for same-sex couples to have their own genetic children. The scientists, led by Richard Berhringer at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Texas, describe the process in a study posted Wednesday in the journal Biology of Reproduction. Here's how it works:
Cells from a male mouse fetus were manipulated to produce an induced pluripotent stem cell line. These iPS cells are ordinary cells that have been reprogrammed to take on a state similar to that of an embryonic stem cell, which can develop into virtually any kind of tissue in the body. About 1 percent of the iPS cell colonies spontaneously lost their Y chromosome, turning them into "XO" cells. These cells were injected into embryos from donor female mice, and transplanted into surrogate mothers. The mommy mice gave birth to babies carrying one X chromosome from the original male mouse. Once these mice matured, the females were mated with normal male mice. Some of their offspring had genetic contributions from both fathers.
More here.
Posted by Azra Raza at 08:08 AM | Permalink | Save to del.icio.us | Digg This | Comments (0)
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