PD Smith at Kafka’s Mouse:

One of the most memorable moments in Robert Musil’s disturbing novel about adolescent angst, Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß (1906; trans. Young Törleß), is when the troubled protagonist lies down in the grounds of his school and gazes up at the deep blue autumn sky. It is as if Törleß is seeing sky for the first time and he is shocked by its unfathomable depths:

“He felt it must be possible, if only one had a long, long ladder, to climb up and into it. But the further he penetrated, raising himself on this gaze, the further the blue, shining depth receded. And still it was as though some time it must be reached, as though by sheer gazing one must be able to stop it and hold it. The desire to do this became agonizingly intense.”

For Törleß, this encounter with the infinite comes to represent the ambiguity of experience and ultimately the inexpressible nature of reality. As Götz Hoeppe’s excellent history of our attempts to explain the blue of the sky shows, from moments of wonder like these, scientific theories grow.

More here.

Via DeLong, impressions solicited:

On the day before the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, Senator Barack Obama delivers a speech to the congregation of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia

From Geotimes:

In the spring of 2006, a team of divers descended into the turquoise waters of the Red Sea, just offshore of one of the limestone islands in the Farasan Islands archipelago. Outfitted with cameras, measuring tapes and special deep-sea scuba gear, the team wasn’t there to admire the colorful corals or vibrant fish that attract most divers to the island chain located 40 kilometers off Saudi Arabia’s southwestern coastline. Instead, they were searching for a rare treasure: submerged traces of our ancestors’ journey out of Africa.

The human fossil record and studies of human genetic diversity agree on the origins of our species: Sometime nearly 200,000 years ago, Homo sapiens emerged in Africa. Then, by 50,000 years ago, a group of these modern humans ventured from their African homeland into the unknown. Descendants of these early explorers eventually made their way across the entire globe, yet the oldest-known successful human population outside of Africa comes from an unlikely place — Australia, where human fossils show our ancestors reached the island continent by at least 45,000 years ago. This fossil evidence and studies of genetics together suggest that humans headed to India and the isolated islands of the Indian Ocean before migrating into Europe or northern Asia tens of thousands of years later. The exact route these early humans used to leave Africa, however, is debated.

More here.

Brigitte Frase in The Minneapolis Star Tribune:

Judith Thurman’s book of essays possesses the three cardinal virtues of nonfiction: Its prose is stylish and often witty; it delves into various topics with hungry curiosity, and it is very, very intelligent. Thurman takes her subjects seriously, giving the same respect and in-depth analysis to “Hump the Grinder’s Hair Wars” as she does to the novels of Gustave Flaubert.

All but one of the pieces were first published in the New Yorker magazine over the past 20 years. They begin as reviews — of books, art, fashion — and then ripen and deepen into psychologically astute essays. As the biographer of two complex, often maddening women — Isak Dinesen and Colette — Thurman became a wily and resourceful spy in the domain of desire: our hungers for sex and love, of course, but also for attention, power, danger, catharsis, degradation, self-erasure, for new sensations, for beauty or perfection, and also for the despoilment of beauty and perfection, without which there can be no eroticism.

Her chosen subjects, a majority of them women, do not traipse lightly through the world. They are furies, fearless explorers of human frontiers, inventors of theatrical selves. Take Diane Arbus, the subject of “Exposure Time.” She was greedy for experiences of the uncanny. Her photographs of misfits, whether handicapped, loony, hideous or merely sad, have the power to profoundly trouble and implicate the viewer; we can’t help staring. Why did they consent to pose? “Everyone with a true and false self secretly knows the answer. The yearning for love is, in part, a desire to become visible as one really is to the Other, though every time one dares to let oneself be seen, one risks being seen through.”

More here.

The editors of Scientific American:

They call it the tera­scale. It is the realm of physics that comes into view when two elementary particles smash together with a combined energy of around a trillion electron volts, or one tera-electron-volt. The machine that will take us to the terascale—the ring-shaped Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN—is now nearing completion.

To ascend through the energy scales from electron volts to the tera­scale is to travel from the familiar world through a series of distinct landscapes: from the domains of chemistry and solid-state electronics (electron volts) to nuclear reactions (millions of electron volts) to the territory that particle physicists have been investigating for the past half a century (billions of electron volts)..

What lies in wait for us at the tera­scale? No one knows.

But radically new phenomena of one kind or another are just about guaranteed to occur. Scientists hope to detect long-sought particles that could help complete our understanding of the nature of matter. More bizarre discoveries, such as signs of additional dimensions, may unfold as well.

More here.  [Thanks to Scott Rosenblum.]

This is getting very little press attention in the West. From Al-Jazeera:

The one-and-a-half million Palestinians in Gaza are struggling to cope amid power cuts as Israel continues its fuel blockade of the territory.

The shutdown of Gaza’s only power plant has prompted fears of a humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip.

Moaiya Hassanain, a health ministry official, said: “We have the choice to either cut electricity on babies in the maternity ward or heart surgery patients or stop operating rooms.”

Gaza City awoke on Monday to find bread shops and petrol stations closed.

Frederik Pleitgen at CNN:

She said her main political goal is to empower Pakistan‘s largely disenfranchised masses and end what she calls the perpetual cycle of “dynastic” cronyism.

What her role would be in making that happen remains the great unknown.

“What I think we need to do is open the field,” said Fatima Bhutto, who went to college in the United States and graduate school in England. “It has to stop being this autocratic, dynastic environment. … When that day comes and this happens — that we have an open field — if there’s a way for me to serve this country, then I would be proud to.”

Until then, she said, she exerts her power from her writing. Fatima Bhutto is a successful columnist, author and poet; a staunch critic of Pervez Musharraf‘s government. And though her name would probably propel her to the highest levels of Pakistani politics almost instantly, she said that won’t happen anytime soon.

More here.

On Watch
Harry Walsh

Some watches at sea
I was so alert
I could see things before they appeared.
Sensing pending arrivals
I would watch a point
on the horizon
until certainly a mast was there,
a needle point of light,
or dawn.
Once I stared at a spot
on the surface of the ocean
beneath which I knew
A whale waited.
I have watched stars
by concentrating on an empty
and dark place in the night.
Watched doors, windows
and miles
waiting for someone
invisible always
but for the turbulence of their passing.

From Outlook India:

Gore Vidal, Ian McEwan, Fatima Bhutto, Dev Anand, Kamila Shamsie, Aamir Khan, Indra Sinha, Manil Suri, William Dalrymple, Aparna Sen, Gurcharan Das, Donna Tartt, Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi, Nayantara Sahgal, Kunal Basu, Jaishree Misra, Mahesh Dattani, U.R. Ananthamurthy, Namita Devidayal, Uday Prakash, M.T. Vasudevan Nair, Anoushka Shankar, Anita Nair, Sudha Murthy, Moni Mohsin, Miranda Seymour, Ambarish Satwick, Pavan Varma, Arun Maira, Tishani Doshi, Sarnath Banerjee, Ira Pande, David Godwin, Jeet Thayil, Aruna Roy, Shahbano Bilgrami, Christopher Hampton, Himanshu Joshi

Literary agent Mita Kapur, one of the organisers of the Jaipur Literature Festival, has never felt more like a harassed travel agent. For a litfest that started with a single writer addressing a dozen readers in a poky little room at the local university four years ago, the Jaipur litfest has come a long way. This year, for example, the litfest has not only managed to raise over Rs 1.35 crore from a variety of sponsors, including banks, breweries, airlines and a construction company, but has also bagged two of the world’s best-known literary stars: Gore Vidal and Ian McEwan, besides nearly a hundred writers from the subcontinent, and publishers and agents from India as well as UK, France, Norway and China.

Just how irresistible this mix of work and play has proved is apparent from the steady stream of inquiries still pouring in at the festival headquarters in Jaipur. Among the last-minute confirmations are Fatima Bhutto and Aamir Khan. Several more, including Indra Sinha, Kamila Shamsie, music memoirist Namita Devidayal and ‘tree man’ Pradip Krishen were squeezed into parallel events at a newly-sponsored tent by Outlook for readings. Dozens of writers who wanted to be part of the programme had to be turned away with a promise to be accommodated next year. Dozens more, including Amartya Sen and Ramachandra Guha, decided to take rain checks for next year because of their schedules. It has turned out to be the season’s most fashionable squeeze.

More here.

In signandsight, a look at the impact of Jan Tomasz Gross’s new book “Fear”:

In recent days a new chapter in the emotional debate over Polish anti-Semitism has opened in Poland. The occasion is the Polish edition of a new book by the Princeton historian of Polish origin Jan Tomasz Gross. The book with the punchy title “Fear. Anti-Semitism in Poland after Auschwitz” (New York 2006) revolves around a central question: “How was Polish anti-Semitism possible after Auschwitz?” According to the reports by Holocaust survivors cited by the author, rather than being welcomed with open arms, Polish Holocaust survivors were met in their hometowns by the cynical question “Are you still alive?!”

The Holocaust victims were confronted with more or less open hostility on the part of the Polish population, which ultimately ended in pogroms. Gross’ book examines three of these in detail, in Rzeszow (1945), Krakow (1945) and the most notorious pogrom in Kielce (1946) in which 37 Jews were murdered.

For Gross, neither the allegedly widespread participation of Polish Jews in the slowly consolidating Communist regime nor the horror stories circulating about the ritual murder of Christian children were the real reasons for these occurrences. Ultimately, economic interests were behind the events. Many Poles had taken possession of Jewish property after the German occupiers fled, and the Holocaust survivors’ return was perceived as a real threat. Regardless of the pretexts for the pogroms, Gross writes, their real purpose was to get rid of the inconvenient victims.

Matt Kaplan is ScienceNOW:

Talk about “gaydar.” In just a fraction of a second, people can accurately judge the sexual orientation of other individuals by glancing at their faces, according to new research. The finding builds on the growing theory that the subconscious mind detects and probably guides much more of human behavior than is realized.

Humans are remarkably good at making snap judgments about others. In a hallmark study conducted by psychologists Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal in 1994, people shown 2-second video clips of professors teaching formed opinions about the professors’ teaching abilities that were uncannily similar to evaluations written by students at the end of a semester. The results led psychologists to begin questioning what else people might detect in a glance.

Ambady and colleague Nicholas Rule, both at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, wondered about sexual orientation. They showed men and women photos of 90 faces belonging to homosexual men and heterosexual men for intervals ranging from 33 milliseconds to 10 seconds. When given 100 milliseconds or more to view a face, participants correctly identified sexual orientation nearly 70% of the time. Volunteers were less accurate at shorter durations, and their accuracy did not get better at durations beyond 100 milliseconds, the team reports in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. “What is most interesting is that increased exposure time did not improve the results,” says Ambady.

In the NYRB:

Distance requires formality, but I cannot be distant writing about Lizzie Hardwick since everything has come alarmingly closer—the curls, the infectious chuckles, the drawl like poured-out honey, the privilege of sharing her astute delight, and the benign devastations of her wit. Because she hated pomposity she was more fun than any American writer I have known. She preferred gaiety to malice and had the laugh to go with it. Memories of her rise like butterflies from a bush, all darting, elate, and light; the use of three adjectives is the signature of her style, perhaps because of the precise languor of her Kentucky accent.

That meter entered her husband’s poems and Cal sometimes sounded as if he were talking in Elizabeth’s voice, as Robert Lowell blended into Elizabeth Hardwick.

Slovenian philosopher and social critic Slavoj Zizek has long been known as the enfant terrible of the intellectual world, but some might wonder if even he hasn’t now gone too far. It was not enough that, as conventional wisdom was announcing with finality the death of Communism and dismissing with contempt anything related to the old Soviet Union, Zizek would publish a book proclaiming the need for “Repeating Lenin”. But now, in a book with a guillotine appropriately emblazoned on the cover, he has decided to champion boldly the legacy of the Reign of Terror’s own Maximilien Robespierre. The central theme of Zizek’s recent work on Lenin, Robespierre and the topic of totalitarianism is the necessity of “the Act”. Some observers might be tempted to ask whether his entire intellectual oeuvre is also some kind of act.

more from Eurozine here.

No one can hear what the figure is muttering to the wall. If you lean close, you can watch his lips moving, but he’s not saying anything. This proximity is intimidating, perhaps more for us than for him. There is a sense of having invaded the sculpture’s space. Illuminated by a powerful spotlight, the figure casts a long, distorted shadow on the wall. Some distance away, another man, seated at a table, turns to listen. He looks as though he is about to demand that the other one speak up. He, too, casts a shadow, just as we cast ours among theirs. In another room, another figure raises his arms and delights in his own monstrous shadow projected before him. All of us, it strikes me now, are shadow puppets, actors and make-believe.

Juan Muñoz made no attempt to convince us that these are real people, not sculptures, except by providing one figure with a mechanism beneath his silicon skin to work his lips.

more from The Guardian here.

From The New York Times:

Just as there are myriad strategies open to the human political animal with White House ambitions, so there are a number of nonhuman animals that behave like textbook politicians. Researchers who study highly gregarious and relatively brainy species like rhesus monkeys, baboons, dolphins, sperm whales, elephants and wolves have lately uncovered evidence that the creatures engage in extraordinarily sophisticated forms of politicking, often across large and far-flung social networks.

Male dolphins, for example, organize themselves into at least three nested tiers of friends and accomplices, said Richard C. Connor of the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, rather like the way human societies are constructed of small kin groups allied into larger tribes allied into still larger nation-states. The dolphins maintain their alliances through elaborately synchronized twists, leaps and spins like Blue Angel pilots blazing their acrobatic fraternity on high.

Among elephants, it is the females who are the born politicians, cultivating robust and lifelong social ties with at least 100 other elephants, a task made easier by their power to communicate infrasonically across miles of savanna floor.

More here.

From Pitchfork:

From Sonic Nurse to…”sadistic doctor”? That’s the big screen turn we can expect out of Kim Gordon in the previously reported, forthcoming short film from director/screenwriter Alia Raza.

Pure White Light, as they’re calling it, has been in production most of this month and also stars Lavender Diamond‘s Becky Stark, OK Go‘s Damian Kulash, and writer and fashion maven Liz Goldwyn.

According to Raza, “The movie is about self-identity in the age of aesthetics and consumerism. It tells the story of a woman’s journey from insecure, lonely ingenue to jaded sophisticate.”

That story was penned by Miranda July, who met Raza through a Me and You and Everyone We Know producer and suggested the budding director choose a short story from one of July’s collections and adapt it for the screen.

More here.  [Alia Raza on right in photo. Thanks to Anjuli Kolb.]

Our own Jaffer Kolb in The Architect’s Journal:

As you walk into British artist Anthony McCall’s show at the Serpentine, the first thing you see is a translucent white perspex screen, smaller than a piece of A4 paper, showing a rotating series of 81 slides of abstract light patterns and shapes. It’s a bit Peter Kubelka, a bit Stan Brakhage, and an unrepresentatively humble first impression of the exhibition. But that’s much of the charm of the artist’s eponymous show: it’s brilliantly curated, leading you into fantastically dramatic blacked-out spaces by way of comparatively low-key process drawings and crude examples of McCall’s work. Numerous schematic diagrams and studies hanging around the slide plinth in the front room show the sculptor at his most architectural. The drawings are precisely done; volumetric light diagrams are suspended in simply ruled boxes; matrices of dots determine the locations for his Fire Cycle series of the early 1970s (where he lit fires in various patterns in the Scottish countryside). It’s a pleasant reminder that process work can be both beautiful and informative – these drawings don’t have that nasty feeling of affectation.

More here.

With the phoney ceasefire over and the Sri Lankan military pressing in on the LTTE’s northern heartland, three distinct scenarios are possible. But in all of them, the constructive role friends of Sri Lanka, in the region and outside, can play is the same.

My friend and 3QD contributor Ram Manikkalingam has an excellent analysis of the situation in Sri Lanka in The Hindu:

Sri Lanka’s phoney peace is over. By abrogating the Ceasefire Agreement (CFA) with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the Sri Lankan government has finally proclaimed what has been a reality for two years — the effective end of the ceasefire brokered by the Norwegians six years ago. The Sinhala-dominated government and the Tamil Tigers have decided that war is not only inevitable but also required, before any fresh political process can emerge. President Mah inda Rajapaksa has promised to eradicate terrorism. His brother, Defence Secretary Gothabaya Rajapaksa, has promised to kill Velupillai Prabakaran, the leader of the Tamil Tigers. Scenting victory, the Sri Lankan military is pressing in on the Tiger heartland of the north on several fronts, while targeting Tiger leaders for assassination.

Meanwhile, the LTTE leader has proclaimed that only military force will work to change the government’s policy. He has directed attacks against hard military targets such as Air Force bases and soft political targets like ministers and civil guardsmen. The Tamil Tigers are using a combination of hit and run attacks, bombings and assassinations to deter and delay the government’s impending assault.

The Sri Lankan government has newly acquired armaments — multi-barrel rocket launchers, heavier artillery, precision guided missiles, and bunker busters — and has recruited 30,000 new recruits into its armed forces. The Tamil Tigers have developed an air wing, an effective sea wing, and have heavily infiltrated population centres in the Sinhala-dominated South. This next round of violence will lead to the deaths of thousands, the displacement of hundreds of thousands, and the destruction of property on a larger scale than what we have ever witnessed before in Sri Lanka.

More here.