From Spiked:

There has been a rumour circulating that Martin Amis, Britain’s ‘greatest living novelist’, had lost his marbles. In the Eighties, Amis was the anti-nuclear darling of English letters. He spliced up the decade of greed in a glitter of satirical wordplay, to the beat of what his father Kingsley called ‘fucking fool’ politics. But with the Nineties, dentistry and divorce, Amis junior entered a period of experimental literature, and then – post 9/11- made some extraordinarily colourful rants about Islamism in the national press.

Last year, he popped up on BBC TV’s Question Time suggesting that the murder of Alexander Litvinenko sprang from the ‘Asiatic’ origin of Russians (you what, Mart?). Suddenly, commentators were arguing that he and Melanie Phillips were level pegging in the ‘lost it’ stakes: Mart had gone from right-on to neo-con and there was not a damn thing media London could do about it. Now, matters have come to a head. A couple of weeks ago, Marxist critic Terry Eagleton published an account of Amis’ post-9/11 essays which described them as the ‘ramblings of a BNP thug’. The press leapt upon Eagleton’s attack with glee, kicking at Amis until he was forced to write a letter defending himself to the Guardian.

Amis’ literary reputation, meanwhile, has gone the same way as the World Trade Center.

More here.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

Scientists from Bangor University’s School of Ocean Studies in Wales recently killed the longest-lived creature ever discovered. It was a clam. A quahog clam, to be precise and it had been living off the coast of Iceland for a little bit more than 400 years until this autumn, when it was dredged up by the team of scientists and opened, thereby killing it, in order to study the rings inside its shell for information about changes in the environment. ABC News noted that as an infant clam it would have been alive at the same time that Shakespeare was staging Hamlet.

This brings to mind a few famous lines from Wordsworth’s poem “The Tables Turned.” He writes:

Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—
We murder to dissect.

These lines tend to get bandied about every time something like the clam incident occurs, which is often. We’re always killing things to find out about them or killing things for the greater benefit or for the Good or simply for pleasure. There is a way, as Wordsworth says, that our meddling intellect is simply murderous.

But it cuts the other way sometimes too. In another recent story we learn that certain frogs have been bred for translucency. A research team in Hiroshima, Japan — I’m not making this up — has crossbred the recessive genes in the Japanese brown frog in order to create frogs with transparent skin. No more dissection. No more classrooms littered with the corpses of our amphibian sacrifices to the Gods of knowledge.

More here.

From Sciencs:

Royalty has its privileges, even in the insect world. Queen honey bees can choose the sex of their offspring, a new study shows. Like a sharp stinger, that finding pokes a hole in the notion that queens are merely mindless egg layers and that worker bees have the final say on whether the queen lays eggs that give rise to males or females.

Every young queen goes on a mating flight and then stores the sperm she collects from multiple matings for the rest of her life, using it up bit by bit as she lays eggs. Males, called drones, emerge from unfertilized eggs, and females emerge from fertilized ones and become the workers. So if the queen adds sperm to an egg, it will produce a female; if she withholds sperm, the egg will produce a male. That would appear to give the queen control over the sex of her offspring. However, the dogma among entomologists is that workers control the type of eggs the queen lays. The workers build the cavities, known as cells, in which the queen will lay her eggs. A queen will lay an unfertilized egg in a particular cell only if the cell is big enough to accommodate a male larva, which is bigger than a female one. So by controlling how many cells they build of each size, the workers can limit how many male offspring the queen produces.

More here.

Amy Alexander in The Nation:

[I]n the weeks since October 14, when Cosby and Poussaint spent a full hour on NBC’s venerable Sunday morning talk show Meet the Press laying out their argument, a sectarian rift has opened in black America–at least the part with access to the Internet and the wherewithal to write op-eds and put up blogs. While Come On, People acknowledges the thick complexity of issues that lay beneath the long list of unhappy statistics affecting some blacks–high rates of homicides, homelessness, single-parent households–Cosby and Poussaint say they want black Americans to take ownership of devising solutions.

I take their argument at face value, and I appreciate the goal of encouraging self-determination. (I also have a connection to Poussaint that gives me insight to his thinking: in 2001, he and I wrote a book together about African-Americans and mental health.) Unlike the overwhelmingly favorable response to broadcaster Tavis Smiley’s bestselling book The Covenant With Black America, reaction from African-Americans to Come On, People has been heated and decidedly mixed.

Much of the animus has to do with Cosby’s enormous wealth and recent accusations from women who claim they had sexual liaisons with the entertainer. And more to the point, Cosby’s notorious talk at a 2004 Brown v. Board of Education fiftieth anniversary event in Washington, DC–in which he railed in harsh language against the destructive behavior of “low-income” blacks–has led some African-Americans to doubt the sincerity of the performer.

The Republic of Abkhazia is one of the few countries, if you can call it that, where every tourist who shows up gets a handshake and a friendly chat with the deputy foreign minister. Or rather, it would be such a country, if it were a country at all. A wee seaside strip in the Republic of Georgia, Abkhazia hasn’t yet persuaded anyone to recognize its independence, even though it boasts many of the trappings of nationhood — a president, a parliament, and an army that guards the border in case the government in Tbilisi wants to invade again.

It also boasts grand natural beauty, an ambiguous history as a holiday playland of tyrants and diseased monkeys, and one of the most agreeable climates on earth. In Sukhumi, the capital, I can see why the Georgians have refused to give up Abkhazia without a fight. Wars break out naturally over territory gorgeous enough to fight for. And Abkhazia — a palm-lined coast supervised by a snowy green sierra — is cursed, like Helen of Troy, with enough beauty to inspire bloodshed of epic duration.

more from The Smart Set here.

In the Mail and Guardian (South Africa):

Earlier this year Habib again applied for a visa to the US, partly to enable him to address the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in August. This time the US state department told him before his departure that his visa application would not be processed in time — despite Habib having made the application in May.

Last month the US government finally wrote to Habib about the matter. Charles Luoma-Overstreet, senior US consul in Johannesburg, told Habib: “I regret to inform you that … the department of state has upheld a finding of your inadmissibility under … the United States Immigration and Nationality Act.”

The letter included a copy of the section of the Act under which Habib had been denied entry. The section is headed “Terrorist Activities” and refers to “any alien who … has engaged in terrorist activity” or who “has, under circumstances indicating an intention to cause death or serious bodily harm, incited terrorist activity”.

These two definitions are part of a lengthy list that includes any “representative” of “a political, social or other similar group whose public endorsement of acts of terrorist activity the secretary of state has determined undermines United States efforts to reduce or eliminate terrorist activities”.

[H/t: Elke Zuern]

In the English-speaking world there is a common perception, largely due to Garnett’s translations, that Tolstoy’s style is classically simple and elegant. This is only partly true. Tolstoy writes with extraordinary clarity. No other writer can recreate emotions and experience with such precision and economy. His moral lexicon is penetrating and direct, without the nuances and ambiguities that make Pushkin so complex, and in this respect Tolstoy’s writing is relatively easy to translate (“goes straight into English, without any trouble,” Garnett said[7] ). But there are other elements of Tolstoy’s literary style, in War and Peace in particular, awkward bumps and angularities that have been ironed out, not just in Garnett’s translation, but in most of the subsequent translations of this masterpiece.

more from the NY Review of Books here.

Even the earliest of Turner’s 146 oil works on display exhibits the remarkable fundamentals that he would build on and transform – substantially – over time. Fisherman at Sea, the first oil painting Turner showed at the Royal Academy (in 1796, following several years’ worth of watercolour works), features elements that would dominate his later studies on the sublime. The full, featureless moon would be repeated again and again across all the modes of his paintings. The wan orb – this time, the sun – hanging low among the rising range of mountains and swoosh of furious weather in Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps (1812) represents stability in the face of nature and permanence through tumultuous history. On the other hand, the sulfurous sun in Calais Sands, Low Water, Poissards Collecting Bait (1830) seems to vaporise the ocean where it touches down in a blistering sunset. The sun’s fierce fire is juxtaposed against the frail, ghost crab-coloured fishwives searching for grub in the low tide.

more from The Guardian here.

Timothy Noah in Slate:

…I quoted and attempted to parse the signature Lapham sentence, which appeared in the following form in the May 1999 issue of Harper’s:

The swarm of cameras following Monica Lewinsky on her progress through a Washington airport or a New York restaurant wouldn’t have surprised the Roman mob familiar with the expensive claques traipsing after the magnificence of the Emperor Nero, their eager and well-fed sycophancy presumably equivalent to the breathless enthusiasms of Barbara Walters.

In essence, Lapham was rephrasing Ecclesiastes: All is vanity. There is nothing new under the sun. Western civilization to contemporary news cycle: Been there, done that. It’s not a particularly penetrating thought, which is why it always needs to be dressed up with windy invocations from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias” and the like. Anyway, Lapham has a new magazine called Lapham’s Quarterly, comprising nothing but writings ancient, contemporary, and in-between, juxtaposed for maximum “all is vanity” impact and arranged under thematic headings like “Calls to Arms” and “Post-Mortems.”

More here.

John E. Joseph in the Times Literary Supplement:

As he lay dying, in 1913, of arteriosclerosis and influenza, still a lethal combination today, Ferdinand de Saussure must have been sure that, come the year 2007, no one would mark the centenary of his first course on general linguistics at the University of Geneva or the sesquicentenary of his birth, on November 26. His name, never widely known, was forgotten except among the few scholars who recalled his impressive Master’s thesis of thirty-four years earlier.

All this depressed him. A modest, even-tempered man, at the age of fifty-five he harboured no deep bitterness, yet the one thing that consistently upset him was being denied his due. On a visit, in 1911, to his sister Albertine, at Mettingham Castle in Suffolk, her husband, Major Hastings Ross-Johnson, raised a sceptical eyebrow at Ferdinand’s claim to descent from English nobility. In good aristocratic form, Saussure disguised his dismay, but as soon as he returned to Geneva he started writing to cousins for information that would confirm the lineage.

More here.

From The Washington Post:

The moment she drawled, “I’d like to kiss ya, but I just washed my hair” in the 1932 film “Cabin in the Cotton,” Bette Davis became two things: a movie star and an icon of camp. She would remain both for the next 57 years of her life. And beyond. “Nervousness, hysteria and paranoia are defining features of Davis’s acting style,” Sikov observes. And the boundary between her art and her life was permeable. In a gratifyingly brief but persuasive bit of psychologizing, Sikov writes, “Davis’s torn nature suggests that she may have had a borderline personality, one that shifts between the commonly neurotic — anxiety, depression, emotional outbursts — and a baldly psychotic inability to perceive the point at which reality stops and paranoid fantasy takes over.”

But the real secret to her career and her life, Sikov suggests, is that “Bette Davis didn’t give a goddamn.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Legend has it that Marie Antoinette’s hair turned white the night before she was guillotined. Presumably the stress of impending decapitation caused her locks to lose color within hours. Extremely unlikely, scientists say, but stress may play a role in a more gradual graying process. The first silvery strands usually pop up around age 30 for men and age 35 for women, but graying can begin as early as high school for some and as late as the 50s for others.

Graying begins inside the sunken pits in the scalp called follicles. A typical human head has about 100,000 of these teardrop-shaped cavities, each capable of sprouting several hairs in a lifetime. At the bottom of each follicle is a hair-growing factory where cells work together to assemble colored hair. Keratinocytes (epidermal cells) build the hair from the bottom up, stacking atop one another and eventually dying, leaving behind mostly keratin, a colorless protein that gives hair its texture and strength. (Keratin is also a primary component of nails, the outer layer of skin, animal hooves and claws?even rhinoceros horns.)

Does stress accelerate this demise of the melanocyte population?

More here.

Colin Nickerson in the Boston Globe:

The Neanderthal extinction some 30,000 years ago remains one of the great riddles of evolution, with rival theories blaming everything from genocide committed by “real” humans to prehistoric climate change.

But a recent study introduces another explanation: Stone Age feminism. Among Neanderthals, hunting big beasts was women’s work as well as men’s, so it’s a safe bet that female hunters got stomped, gored, and worse with appalling frequency. And a high casualty rate among fertile women – the vital “reproductive core” of a tiny population – could well have meant demographic disaster for a species already struggling to survive among monster bears, yellow-fanged hyenas, and cunning Homo sapien newcomers.

A spate of recent discoveries has yielded intriguing clues about humanity’s closest cousin.

More here.

Over at bloggingheads.tv:

During the tour of America that he chronicled in “The American Scene,” Henry James made a stop in Concord, Mass. By 1904, when James visited, the town’s glory days were half a century in the past. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne were almost as distant as the minutemen who fired the shot heard round the world. James, who had spent decades living in the capitals of Europe, wrote about Concord with a certain embarrassment, as though describing a country cousin. The river reminded him of “some large obese benevolent person,” the town itself of “some grave, refined New England matron of the ‘old school,’ the widow of a high celebrity, living on and in possession of all his relics and properties.” He imagined Concord pleading with him not to demand too much, not to expect America’s intellectual shrine to rival Paris or London: “Compare me with places of my size, you know.”

In James’s embarrassed affection for Concord, we recognize our own mixed feelings about the men and women who made it famous: the loose conspiracy of philosophers, preachers, idealists, and cranks known as the Transcendentalists.

more from The NY Sun here.

American poetry of the nineteen-sixties was a contest of brilliant, unforgettable boasts: “I myself am hell,” Robert Lowell insists; “I eat men like air,” Sylvia Plath crows; “Versing, I shroud among the dynasties,” John Berryman struts. For a moment—the so-called “confessional” moment—the recipe for poetic power was misery mixed with braggadocio. Mark Strand and Robert Hass, two of our finest contemporary poets and both former United States Poet Laureates, started writing at that moment. And yet they occcupy a temperate middle region often thought to be inhospitable to the imagination, which thrives (as Lowell’s, Plath’s, and Berryman’s did) at the poles: burning and freezing, loving and hating, torn between Shakespeare’s “comfort and despair.” (“When Shakespeare wrote, ‘Two loves I have,’ reader, he was not kidding,” Berryman writes.) An entire zone of “ordinary” emotion—where most of us spend most of our time—had not been represented in American poetry. Strand and Hass, more comfortable than despairing, write in that zone.

more from The New Yorker here.

CALL THE Department of Social Services van: I showed “The Jazz Singer” to my children. The groundbreaking 1927 talkie has recently been released in a three-DVD 80th anniversary set, and it remains weirdly entertaining. My two daughters, old hands at old movies, were enthralled. About two-thirds of the way in, though, the film suddenly turns the corner into unforgivable pop travesty: Al Jolson sits at a backstage makeup table and applies burnt cork to his face. Pulls on a nappy wig. Becomes a cartoon black man, singing “Mother of Mine, I Still Have You.”

The kids were appalled. How could someone do that? Didn’t the filmmakers understand it was racist?

Welcome, my children, to your culture’s dirty secret.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

Daniel N. Rockmore reviews Mathematics and Common Sense: A Case of Creative Tension by Philip J. Davis, in American Scientist:

These essays offer, among other things, a bird’s-eye view of the world of professional mathematics. The more interesting material derives from the fertile, if somewhat uneasy or even confusing, relationship mathematics has with the real world and real people. In essence, Davis makes the point that mathematics and common sense spring from the same source—a human, if not primal, inclination to organize and communicate experience—but that mystery, confusion and even magic can arise out of these humble human origins.

For example, the property of “fiveness,” which could be common to a small flock of sheep, the members of the shepherd’s family and the fingers on the shepherd’s hand, is more generally a concept of number that comes out of the penchant for and necessity of identifying one-to-one correspondences. Geometry can be seen as the natural outcome of the search for a means of communicating size and shape. The irony is that from such “common sense” and concrete inclinations, mysteries are born. Considerations of number lead naturally to the primes, still a source of simple-to-state but difficult-to-solve problems. Contemplating distance, we come quickly to irrational numbers (note the name!) and, over time, to the mind-bending pursuits and puzzles of modern geometry and topology.

More here.

Richard Rorty in Poetry:

Shortly after finishing “Pragmatism and Romanticism,” I was diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer. Some months after I learned the bad news, I was sitting around having coffee with my elder son and a visiting cousin. My cousin (who is a Baptist minister) asked me whether I had found my thoughts turning toward religious topics, and I said no. “Well, what about philosophy?” my son asked. “No,” I replied, neither the philosophy I had written nor that which I had read seemed to have any particular bearing on my situation. I had no quarrel with Epicurus’s argument that it is irrational to fear death, nor with Heidegger’s suggestion that ontotheology originates in an attempt to evade our mortality. But neither ataraxia (freedom from disturbance) nor Sein zum Tode (being toward death) seemed in point.

“Hasn’t anything you’ve read been of any use?” my son persisted. “Yes,” I found myself blurting out, “poetry.” “Which poems?” he asked. I quoted two old chestnuts that I had recently dredged up from memory and been oddly cheered by…

More here.  [Thanks to Thomas Zipp.]