talking about books you’ve never read

Commentlire

It would, of course, be wrong to take everything Bayard writes here seriously – and maybe he would not want us to – but we could do worse than heed his therapeutic advice when he suggests that

“in order to . . . talk without shame about books we haven’t read, we should rid ourselves of the oppressive image of a flawless cultural grounding, transmitted and imposed [on us] by the family and by educational institutions, an image which we try all our lives in vain to match up to. For truth in the eyes of others matters less than being true to ourselves, and this truth is only accessible to those who liberate themselves from the constraining need to appear cultured, which both tyrannizes us and prevents us from being ourselves.”

Bayard cheerfully insists that he will continue to talk about books he hasn’t read – he seems to have got away with it until now – and offers the optimistic notion that only when people overcome their “fear of culture” can they themselves begin to write.

more from the TLS here.

Fridfinnsson

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In the mid-1970s, the Icelandic artist Hreinn Fridfinnsson placed an advert in a Dutch art magazine asking people to send him their secrets. By posing as a collector of secrets, the artist would, he thought, allay suspicions that he had any ulterior motive in using or revealing privileged information that might come his way. The offer still stands, though to this day he has had no replies. Unless, that is, he is lying, and covering up for all the secrets he has collected.

It is like something from a novel by José Saramago, or an urban myth or rumour. The secret, Fridfinnsson may be telling us, is that there isn’t one. His art, on the other hand, is an invitation to dream that there might be.

more from The Guardian here.

More honest than the facts

Growing up under a censoring dictatorship taught me how fiction can be a place of truth.

Kamila Shamsie in The Guardian:

Shame_2Growing up in Pakistan, in the benighted days of Zia ul-Haq’s dictatorship, I knew there was always some sense of consistency to be drawn from the evening news, which year after year assured viewers that every day only three items of note occurred in the world: president inaugurates something; someone of significance lauds president; X number of Kashmiris killed (later changed to “martyred”) by Indian army. The print media was rather more courageous in what it was willing to publish, but even so, in those times of censorship and state control the news told you very little about the truth of the country in which you were living.

Remarkably, this absence of truth was often possible without recourse to lies – the president really did inaugurate all kinds of things; disgraceful numbers of the world’s noteworthy figures did extol the virtues of Zia, America’s frontline ally in the Afghan war against the Soviets; and the Indian army was brutal in Kashmir, though it’s worth mentioning that the level of brutality that started in 1987 seemed already to have made itself known to the prescient Pakistani newscasters in the early 80s – though this may well be the unreliable narration of my childhood memory speaking.

Into this world there dropped a book. A novel, to be precise. Its title was Shame, its author Salman Rushdie, its subject the world of Pakistani politics.

More here.

Covert Ops

Joe Queenan in the New York Times Book Review:

Screenhunter_16_jul_18_1300When discussing the movers and shakers who made the last third of the 20th century so special, people tend to rattle off names like Mao Zedong, Richard Nixon, Yasir Arafat, Henry Kissinger, Pol Pot and Ronald Reagan. Yet if John Perkins, the author of “The Secret History of the American Empire,” is to be believed, to that list must be added one more name: his own.

Perkins is the author of the fabulously successful, and in some quarters revered, “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man,” which explains how a cabal of wicked men like him have enabled perfidious corporations to seize control of the planet. Now, in a follow-up written not for crass financial gain but because he owes it to his fellow man, the promiscuously altruistic Perkins comes completely clean about the epochal role he has played in ruining life on earth.

More here.

The 7 Most Wondrous Moments In Science

Ruchira Paul at Accidental Blogger:

ArchimedesThe scientists credited with the top seven eureka moments, in an ascending order of excitement (with the discovery of penicillin the winner) are:

More here.

How Jim Morrison Died

Vivienne Walt in Time:

Morrison_grave_0713Even on a gray day in Paris last week, there was one place you could find a crowd of tourists from places as varied as Rome, Tokyo and Orlando, Florida — gathered at the Pere Lachaise cemetery, around the graveside of Jim Morrison. Forget Chopin, Oscar Wilde, and the hundreds of other luminaries interred among its chestnut trees, the frontman of The Doors has long been the cemetery’s headline draw. Part of the attraction is the almost mystical magnetism he exuded in life; part is the macabre mystery of his demise: How did one of the legends of the rock age die in a Paris bathtub in 1971 at age 27, of what the Paris police report said were “natural causes”?

He did not, according to Sam Bernett, whose French book The End — Jim Morrison has just appeared here.

More here.

Race in a Bottle

From Scientific American:

Race Two years ago, on June 23, 2005, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the first “ethnic” drug. Called BiDil (pronounced “bye-dill”), it was intended to treat congestive heart failure—the progressive weakening of the heart muscle to the point where it can no longer pump blood efficiently—in African-Americans only.

A close inspection of BiDil’s history, however, shows that the drug is ethnic in name only. First, BiDil is not a new medicine—it is merely a combination into a single pill of two generic drugs, hydralazine and isosorbide dinitrate, both of which have been used for more than a decade to treat heart failure in people of all races. Second, BiDil is not a pharmacogenomic drug. Although studies have shown that the hydralazine/isosorbide dinitrate (H/I) combination can delay hospitalization and death for patients suffering from heart failure, the underlying mechanism for the drug’s efficacy is not fully understood and has not been directly connected to any specific genes. Third, and most important, no firm evidence exists that BiDil actually works better or differently in African-Americans than in anyone else. The FDA’s approval of BiDil was based primarily on a clinical trial that enrolled only self-identified African-Americans and did not compare their health outcomes with those of other ethnic or racial groups.

More here.

No Cancer Benefit From Extra Fruits and Veggies

From Science:

Fruit Eating more than five servings of fruits and vegetables–the amount recommended by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)–doesn’t provide any additional protection against breast cancer, a new study finds. However, eating the recommended amount still appears to help protect against the disease. Doctors have been keen to determine whether increased amounts of antioxidant-rich fruits and vegetables can reduce a woman’s risk even further.

To find out, John Pierce of the University of California, San Diego, and colleagues tracked the health of more than 3000 women who had previously been treated for early-stage breast cancer. Half the women received literature promoting the FDA-approved target of five servings of fruits and vegetables per day, and the other half received this plus counseling and literature promoting significant additional intake of fruits, vegetables, and dietary fiber coupled with a reduced-fat diet. After monitoring each volunteer for about 7 years, the researchers compared the rates of relapse and new breast tumors in the two groups, as they report this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association. In both categories, the rates were the same, indicating that subjects got no extra benefit from the additional produce.

More here.

a pact with the devil

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Thomas Mann is considered the most music-obsessed author in the history of literature. His powers of description were at their best when he was writing about music. But professional musicians have constantly objected to his statements on music. How to explain that?

For this author, music, romantic music in particular, is the “magician of souls” – but possibly with very dark results. The argumentative key of “Dr. Faustus” lies in the claim that Germany did not descend the path into National Socialist barbarianism “in contradiction” to its classical music culture but rather in evocation of it. And not only because Adolf Hitler was a fanatic music-lover and Wagner fan.

Anyone talking about the “Third Reich” and what came before also has to talk about music. Musicians don’t like to hear that much.

more from Sign and Sight here.

days of rage

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In the white glare of a hot summer’s noon, the broad avenues of Islamabad, Pakistan’s modern capital, are usually empty. But on a sweltering day this May the streets were crowded with noisily chanting protesters, all of them demonstrating against the military government of President Pervez Musharraf. Three separate protests were under way. Each one represented a slightly different vision of the future that Pakistan might have if—as now seems more likely than ever—Musharraf’s government were to fall.

The largest crowd by far was made up of lawyers in starched collars, white shirts, and black suits. They marched in orderly ranks, three abreast, like emperor penguins in a nature film. Some held up very British-looking umbrellas, on which markedly un-catchy slogans, such as “Long Live Lawyers Unity,” had been carefully daubed in white paint. In earlier demonstrations, the lawyers had clashed with riot police, and the country’s most senior barristers, silk ties flying, had responded with surprising vigor, hurling back tear-gas cannisters at staff-wielding policemen and jabbing at them with furled umbrellas.

more from The New Yorker here.

heidegger’s hut

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I stood on a steeply sloping hillside deep in the Black Forest, panting, bathed in sweat and covered in mud. A group of llamas had stopped grazing nearby to watch me. After disorientation and fatigue, flying, driving, walking, and running, after springing over an electrified fence and sliding down a wooded slope, after losing my phone, my wife, and my bearings, I had at last found Martin Heidegger’s hut.

Martin Heidegger was born in the small town of Messkirch on the edge of the Black Forest in 1889, a few months after Nietzsche rushed across the Piazza Carlo Alberto in Turin, threw his arms around a cab-horse, and never came out of the embrace. This conjuncture was to be an important one for the young Heidegger; he saw a line of continuity in the idea that he came into the world as Nietzsche’s reason left it. Heidegger would go on to compare philosophical communication as speaking from mountain top to mountain top, and Nietzsche, in his Alpine seclusion, was, for him, the nearest peak.

more from Cabinet here.

In Princes’ Pockets

Tariq Ali in the London Review of Books:

Screenhunter_15_jul_17_2149The day after the attacks on New York and Washington in 2001, a Saudi woman resident in London, a member of a wealthy family, rang her sister in Riyadh to discuss the crisis affecting the kingdom. Her niece answered the phone.

‘Where’s your mother?’

‘She’s here, dearest aunt, and I’ll get her in a minute, but is that all you have to say to me? No congratulations for yesterday?’

The dearest aunt, out of the country for far too long, was taken aback. She should not have been. The fervour that didn’t dare show itself in public was strong even at the upper levels of Saudi society. US intelligence agencies engaged in routine surveillance were, to their immense surprise, picking up unguarded cellphone talk in which excited Saudi princelings were heard revelling in bin Laden’s latest caper. Like the CIA, they had not thought it possible for him to reach such heights.

Washington had taken its oldest ally in the Arab world for granted. In the weeks that followed 9/11, the Saudi royal family was besieged by a storm of critical comment in the US media and its global subsidiaries. Publishers eager to make a quick dollar hurriedly produced a few bad books with even worse titles – Hatred’s Kingdom, Sleeping with the Devil – that set out to denounce the Saudis. The mini-industry had little medium-term impact, and normal business was soon resumed. On 14 February 2005 there was even a re-enactment of the meeting that had taken place sixty years before on the USS Quincy, moored in the Suez Canal, at which Roosevelt and Ibn Saud, the first king of Saudi Arabia, signed the concordat that would guarantee continued single-family rule. The interpreter was Colonel William Eddy, a senior US intelligence officer and much else besides. Considered too insecure during the ‘global war on terror’, Suez was rejected as a potential venue for the re-enactment: the grandsons of the two principals and Eddy’s nephew had to make do with the Ritz in Coconut Grove, Florida. A giant gold-plated Cadillac in the Arizona desert might have been more appropriate.

More here.

Jewel of the Jungle

Traveling through Cambodia, our writer details the history and archaeology of Angkor’s ancient temples.

Cardiff de Alejo Garcia in Smithsonian Magazine:

Screenhunter_14_jul_17_2145I had come to the temples of Angkor prepared, having read about their archaeology and history and learned of their immense size and intricate detail. The mystery of why an early Khmer civilization chose to abandon the temples in the mid-15th century, after building them during a period of more than 500 years, intrigued me. So too did the tales of travelers who “discovered” Angkor in the centuries that followed, some of whom thought they had stumbled across a lost city founded by Alexander the Great or the Roman Empire—until finally, in the 1860s, the French explorer Henri Mouhot reintroduced the temples to the world with his ink drawings and the postmortem publication of his journal, Travels in Siam, Cambodia, and Laos.

But on that first morning I realized that such knowledge was unnecessary to appreciate this remarkable achievement of architecture and human ambition. “There are few places in the world where one feels proud to be a member of the human race, and one of these is certainly Angkor,” wrote the late Italian author Tiziano Terzani. “There is no need to know that for the builders every detail had a particular meaning. One does not need to be a Buddhist or a Hindu to understand. You need only let yourself go…”

More here.

At Home With Hitler

The following article appeared in Homes & Gardens magazine in its November, 1938 issue. From wow.blogs.com:

Hitler’s Mountain Home
A visit to ‘Haus Wachenfeld’ in the Bavarian Alps, written and illustrated by Ignatius Phayre

Screenhunter_13_jul_17_2133It is over twelve years since Herr Hitler fixed on the site of his one and only home. It had to be close to the Austrian border, barely ten miles from Mozart’s own medieval Salzburg. At first no more than a hunter’s shack, “Haus Wachenfeld” has grown until it is to-day quite a handsome Bavarian chalet, 2,000 feet up on the Obersalsburg amid pinewoods and cherry orchards. Here, in the early days, Hitler’s widowed sister, Frau Angela Raufal, kept house for him on a “peasant” scale. Then, as his famous book Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”) became a best-seller of astonishing power (4,500,000 copies of it have been sold), Hitler began to think of replacing that humble shack by a house and garden of suitable scope. In this matter he has throughout been his own architect.

There is nothing pretentious about the Führer’s little estate. It is one that any merchant of Munich or Nuremberg might possess in these lovely hills.

More here.

Coley’s Cancer-Killing Concoction

Matt Castle in Damn Interesting:

Screenhunter_12_jul_17_2127On October 1st 1890, William B. Coley, a young bone surgeon barely two years out of medical school, saw one of his first patients in private practice at the New York Memorial Hospital. Although he’d only finished his residency earlier the same year, he’d already gained a good reputation and many considered him a rising star of the New York surgical scene.

The seventeen year old patient had a painful, rapidly growing lump on the back of her right hand. She had pinched the unlucky appendage between two railway carriage seats on a transcontinental trip to Alaska some months before, and when the bruise failed to heal she assumed the injury had become infected. However the bruise turned into a bulge, the pain steadily worsened, and her baffled doctors were eventually compelled to call for Dr. Coley. As a surgical man, Coley would never have guessed that this innocuous referral would take his career in a totally new direction– into an unusual branch of medicine now known as cancer immunotherapy.

More here.

Inferior Design

Richard Dawkins in the New York Times Book Review:

DawkinsI had expected to be as irritated by Michael Behe’s second book as by his first. I had not expected to feel sorry for him. The first — “Darwin’s Black Box” (1996), which purported to make the scientific case for “intelligent design” — was enlivened by a spark of conviction, however misguided. The second is the book of a man who has given up. Trapped along a false path of his own rather unintelligent design, Behe has left himself no escape. Poster boy of creationists everywhere, he has cut himself adrift from the world of real science. And real science, in the shape of his own department of biological sciences at Lehigh University, has publicly disowned him, via a remarkable disclaimer on its Web site: “While we respect Prof. Behe’s right to express his views, they are his alone and are in no way endorsed by the department. It is our collective position that intelligent design has no basis in science, has not been tested experimentally and should not be regarded as scientific.” As the Chicago geneticist Jerry Coyne wrote recently, in a devastating review of Behe’s work in The New Republic, it would be hard to find a precedent.

More here.

Taking Out the Trash in Space

Gina Sunseri at ABC News:

Screenhunter_11_jul_17_2115The numbers are staggering: 13,000 pieces of junk, each of them more than 30 feet long, are orbiting in space.

There are at least another 100,000 hunks of junk that measure between 1 and 10 centimeters (roughly one-half to 4 inches). And the number of pieces smaller than 1 centimeter orbiting the Earth is in the millions.

It’s a mess up there.

Why does NASA care so much about all the space junk? Because it only takes one tiny object, flying at thousands of miles an hour, to punch a catastrophic hole in the International Space Station or a space shuttle.

When astronauts need to throw something away on the space station, they don’t want to add to the problem. They can wait for a Russian Progress supply ship to take it away, or return it to Earth on a shuttle flight.

More here.

Stop Starving Our Urban Public Universities

Stephen Jordan in InsideHigherEd:

Conflicting pressures have put urban public institutions of higher education that serve large numbers of low-income and students of color in a straitjacket.

Major cities in the U.S. generally have higher concentrations of poverty, communities of color and immigrants than the suburbs do. The problems facing higher education in cities dovetail with other urban problems such as the quality of urban K-12 schools and the socioeconomic status of their students.

Consequently, state-supported urban institutions are being asked — and have moral and long-term economic imperatives — to provide more academic and student support services to students coming through pre-collegiate educational pipelines that have not prepared them for college than is true for many other kinds of colleges.

Compounding the problem, we are being presented with increasing performance and accountability mandates. All of this is happening at a time when state funding for those institutions is declining in a scandalous way, yet the pressure on them to keep tuition low is increasing. In short, we are being asked to do more with far fewer resources than ever before.

More here.

Nuke nemesis?

Dominick Donald in The Guardian:

Mushroom_cloudIt seems a little surreal to be thinking about nuclear weapons at a time when the UK has just been attacked by NHS doctors attempting to turn propane gas and black powder into fuel-air bombs. But Trident is to be replaced, Iran still appears committed to acquiring the bomb, North Korea has yet to set it aside, and hanging over our heads is the oft-spoken fear that fanatics might get hold of nuclear weapons technology and immolate a city. It is these fears that set the scene for PD Smith’s Doomsday Men and William Langewiesche’s The Atomic Bazaar.

Doomsday Men follows the chicken-and-egg circle of extraordinary scientific achievement, and the fiction that fed off it, to show how the idea of the doomsday weapon made possible the reality by preparing the political, cultural and – particularly among scientists – moral grounds for its acceptance. The Atomic Bazaar, on the other hand, investigates the drift of nuclear weapons technology from the hands of the rich world to those of the poor, attempting to ascertain where the 21st-century nuclear threat might really lie. It is basically two Vanity Fair essays bolted together in one slim, light, overpriced volume; it says nothing that hasn’t been said more weightily elsewhere, but does it very nicely, and without taking itself too seriously.

Doomsday Men, on the other hand, suffers from portentousness.

More here.

Möbius strip unravelled

From Nature:

Strip Eugene Starostin’s desk is littered with rectangular pieces of paper. He picks one up, twists it, and joins the two ends with a pin. The resulting shape has a beautiful simplicity to it — the mathematical symbol for infinity in three-dimensional form. “Look,” he says, as he traces his finger along its side, “whatever path you take, you always end up where you started.” Discovered independently by two German mathematicians in 1858 — but named after just one of them — the Möbius strip has beguiled artists, illuminated science lessons and stubbornly resisted definition.

Until now, that is. Starostin and his colleague Gert van der Heijden, both of University College London, have solved a conundrum that has perplexed mathematicians for more than 75 years — how to predict what three-dimensional form a Möbius strip will take. The strip is made from what mathematicians call a ‘developable’ surface, which means it can be flattened without deforming its shape — unlike, say, a sphere. When a developable surface is formed into a Möbius strip, it tries to return to a state of minimum stored elastic energy, like an elastic band springing back after being stretched. But no one has been able to model what this final form will be. “The first papers looking at this problem were published in 1930,” says Starostin. “It seems such a simple question — children can make these things — but ask the experts how to model this shape and we’ve had nothing.”

More here.