Chuck Mertz has earned a following stirring up politics on WNUR, but can he move on?

Jordan Weismann in the Daily Northwestern:

It’s 8:58 a.m., two minutes until show time and there he is, rushing through the studio door with his graying, shoulder length mane bobbing behind. Chuck Mertz, the host of WNUR’s This Is Hell, is a bit late, which is to say right about on schedule. The last show tune from Breakfast With Broadway cuts off and an ambient track fills up the dead air. Mertz darts around, shuffling papers, pulling them up just an inch or two from his door-wedge of a nose so he is able to read the page. For the next few minutes, he is a 45-year-old, legally blind flurry. Then at 9:08, he is seated and ready, script in hand and a bottle of RC Cola at his side.

For nine years, this has been Mertz’s Saturday morning ritual. More than 60 hours of his time each week go into planning This Is Hell, a four-hour, current affairs marathon, which he presides over like a Gonzo Charlie Rose, careening between pot jokes, wry observations, dive-bar schtick and serious, long-form interviews. Noam Chomsky has been a guest four times; Howard Zinn, Joseph Stiglitz and Michael Moore have chatted with him on air; so do Hugo Chavez supporters, war reporters and experts on Chicagoland gangs. Guests often speak for up to forty minutes, giving listeners a rare window into their thinking. By many accounts the hard work has made This Is Hell WNUR’s flagship show, with a cult audience that, thanks to the web, listens in from Chicago, England, Australia and even Senegal. This would be Mertz’s dream job, if only it paid.

More here.  The shows podcast feed is: feed://www.thisishell.net/rss.xml and its website is http://www.thisishell.net/   The January 12th show (available in the archives: http://www.thisishell.net/archives.html ) featured Fatima Bhutto and Patrick Cockburn, along with other guests. [Thanks to Bryon Giddens-White.]

Dan Chiasson in the New York Times:

Louis Zukofsky (1904-78) is the author of an enormous poem called simply “A,” an 800-plus-page work written over the course of more than 50 years in a mélange of styles and forms, from Poundian free verse to Italian canzoni. “A”-21 — the poem was composed of 24 parts, mirroring the hours of the day — translates an entire play by Plautus. “A”-24, the final section, is the score of a masque composed by Zukofsky’s wife, Celia. “The most hermetic poem in English,” a “long intent eccentric unread game,” was the critic Hugh Kenner’s judgment of “A,” and Kenner liked it.

Reading “A” is hard; in its time, even getting the chance to try was hard. Until 1979, a year after Zukofsky’s death, when it was finally published in its entirety, only privately printed partial editions circulated, including a beautiful “A” 1-12 set by the poetry impresario Cid Corman in Japan in an edition of 200. (You had to know Corman personally in order to be allowed to buy one.) Zukofsky, who like Joyce died of a perforated ulcer that had long caused him pain, would seem the very model of the cantankerous, obscure, even obscurantist modern poet.

“The Poem of a Life,” Mark Scroggins’s terrific new biography, never strays far from Zukofsky the poet.

More here.

William Booth in Smithsonian Magazine:

“I admit it does sound crazy,” says Michael Wong of his idea to use gold to clean up toxic waste. Wong plans to combine gold with palladium—an even more precious metal—to treat polluted groundwater beneath waste dumps and contaminated factories and military sites. “It not only works faster [than current methods], but a hundred times faster,” Wong says, “and I bet it will be cheaper too.”

A golden detergent? Here is Wong’s trick: he creates nanoparticles of gold. In his realm, the work product is measured not in carats but in atoms. A thimbleful of coffee-colored solution contains 100 trillion gold spheres—each only 15 atoms wide, or about the width of a virus. Upon every golden nanosphere, Wong and his team dust a dash of palladium atoms. Think of an infinitely small ice-cream scoop flecked with sprinkles.

The 35-year-old Caltech and MIT graduate says he had not given toxic waste much thought until three years ago when one of his colleagues at Rice University (where he is a recently tenured professor of chemical engineering) came to him and said, “I have a problem,” meaning something interesting to work on.

More here.

Morgan in The Smart Set:

These days, we’re weary of being weary. But that gets us nowhere. Then, into the midst of all the funk and gloom, comes one of the most boring books of our time. And it is as deeply satisfying a dull torpor as we’ve been gifted in recent memory. The book is Peter Gay’s Modernism. It is something akin to a high school textbook, with categories like “Prose and Poetry,” “Music and Dance,” “Architecture and Design,” and the like. Gay, in explaining the difficulties presented to anyone trying to write a history of Modernism, says:

Not surprisingly, then, cultural historians intimidated by the chaotic, steadily evolving panorama they are trying in retrospect to reduce to order have sought refuge in a prudential plural: “modernisms.” This compliment to the turbulence that pervades the modern marketplace for art, literature, and the rest shows due respect for an imaginative individuality that has for almost two centuries ignited spirited debate over taste, its expressiveness, morality, economics, and politics, and over their psychological or social origins and implications.

The turbulence, Gay suggests in 510 pages, is very much over. And he has the prose to prove it. Modernism is dead. We all knew this, of course, but we still didn’t necessarily believe it. We needed to go to the funeral. We wanted to see the body. Now we have. Peter Gay is our undertaker. We needed someone to do the job of writing the final obituary for Modernism and it was such an immensely tiresome task that we left it off for more than 20 years. We were bad. Peter Gay, a good man, has finally stepped to the fore. He has written one of the least engaging books of our time. And this, I submit, is the perfect antidote to our lingering discontent. Peter Gay is a hero.

A few years ago, my first novel was published. It did pretty well, won an award, was translated and sold around the world; the movie rights were even optioned. Now I want to put it online — no charge, no hook, no catch. My motivation is simple: greed.

My publishers are resolutely opposed to this idea. They fear it will “devalue the brand” and set a dangerous precedent. They fear, intuitively but wrongly, that fewer people will buy a book that is also given away for free. But most of all, they fear the future — and with good reason. Book publishing is a dinosaur industry, and there’s a big scary meteor on the way.

more from The Walrus here.

After his famous ‘Age of . . .’ trilogy on the 19th century, E. J. Hobsbawm published a coda (best-selling but in my view much less satisfactory) on the history of the 20th century. It begins with a bleak page of epigraphs, among others from Isaiah Berlin — ‘the most terrible century in Western history,’ William Golding — ‘the most violent century in human history,’ and René Dumont — ‘I see it only as a century of massacre and war.’ This theme of ‘mankind’s worst century’ has become something of a cliché, and deserves closer examination, not least because it almost implies that the horrors of the age were natural catastrophes, like hurricanes or epidemics.

If you blink, then a perfectly obvious case can be made that the 20th century was far and away the best in human history. Any horrors it endured came not from evolutionary change but from unnatural aberrations, in the form of what men did to one another in the name of ideologies. Bernard Wasserstein takes the title of his excellent new book from Walter Benjamin: ‘There is no document of civilisation that is not simultaneously a document of barbarism.’ This is a nice line, but it deserves the examiner’s ‘Discuss’. For much of European history, the Whig view — onward and upward — did not seem absurd, and that was never less so than 100 years ago, in that golden age so memorably apostrophised by Keynes. What any historian thus has to address is why Europe relapsed so terrifyingly into catastrophic war, despotism and mass murder.

more from The Spectator here.

For most of his life and more than a century after his death, Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-1797) was known for two things – having his name hitched to a city and being Britain’s best painter of candlelight. Never mind the quirky portraits and the moonlit waterways, never mind the extraordinary scenes of scientific revelation for which he is now deservedly famous; what mainly struck the public, it seems, was Wright’s gift for making a drama out of candles in darkness.

This will seem odd to anyone who has ever seen his great work, An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, in which a group of spectators is transfixed but also terrified by the theatre of science. Spooky lighting admittedly plays its part – the living faces, especially the showman-scientist, the pickled skull in the foreground, the cockatoo trapped in the deadly glass: all are illuminated by a single candle – but what compels is the terrible possibility that the bird will eventually be starved of oxygen altogether in order to demonstrate the novelty of the vacuum pump.

more from The Observer Review here.

Vikram Seth, author of the lyrical feast Golden Gate, gives us some monosyllabic poems inspired by George Herbert and tells of the source of the inspiration (via Amitava Kumar):

Host

I heard it was for sale and thought I’d go
To see the old house where
He lived three years, and died. How could I know
Its stones, its trees, its air,
The stream, the small church, the dark rain would say:
“You’ve come; you’ve seen; now stay.”

“A guest?” I asked. “Yes, as you are on earth.”
“The means?” “. . . will come, don’t fear.”
“What of the risk?” “Our lives are that from birth.”
“His ghost?” “His soul is here.”
“He’ll change my style.” “Well, but you could do worse
Than rent his rooms of verse.”

Joy came, and grief; love came, and loss; three years –
Tiles down; moles up; drought; flood.
Though far in time and faith, I share his tears,
His hearth, his ground, his mud;
Yet my host stands just out of mind and sight,
That I may sit and write.

In the NY Sun:

As if it didn’t already have enough, the East River seems to attract water: Last summer, its big draw was a floating swimming pool; this summer, it will be waterfalls — created by an artist.

Olafur Eliasson, a Danish–Icelandic artist whose installation “The Weather Project” drew 2 million people to the Tate Modern in 2003 and 2004, has designed what will likely be the city’s biggest public art project since Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s “The Gates”: a series of freestanding waterfalls in the East River.

Mayor Bloomberg and the Public Art Fund, a private nonprofit organization that produced, among other works, Anish Kapoor’s “Sky Mirror” and Jeff Koons’s “Puppy,” both at Rockefeller Center, are scheduled to announce Mr. Eliasson’s project at the South Street Seaport tomorrow.

According to a source whom the mayor told about the project, the waterfalls will rise about 60 to 70 feet above the water — more than half as high as the roadway of the Brooklyn Bridge. They will be visible from the area around the Seaport, from Brooklyn Heights, and from the Governors Island Ferry.

That mirror
   Which makes of men a transparency,
      Who holds that mirror
And bids us such a breast-bare spectacle see
      Of you and me?

      That mirror
   Whose magic penetrates like a dart,
      Who lifts that mirror
And throws our mind back on us, and our heart,
      Until we start?

      That mirror
   Works well in these night hours of ache;
      Why in that mirror
Are tincts we never see ourselves once take
      When the world is awake?

      That mirror
   Can test each mortal when unaware;
      Yea, that strange mirror
May catch his last thoughts, whole life foul or fair,
      Glassing it–where?

Thomas Hardy, Moments Of Vision And Miscellaneous Verses

From The Washington Post:

SELLOUT: The Politics of Racial Betrayal By Randall Kennedy

In a 1963 speech Malcom X distilled black America’s long history of social and political struggle into two simple yet enduring composites: House Negroes and Field Negroes. Field Negroes bore the brunt of racial oppression from antebellum slavery to the civil rights era’s high tide, while House Negroes craved white approval, shared secrets with racial oppressors and generally aided and abetted white supremacy. They were the race traitors, the sellouts, the Uncle Toms.

“Suspicions regarding racial betrayal continue to be omnipresent,” writes Harvard Law professor Randall Kennedy in his slim but thought-provoking Sellout, which challenges conventional understanding of what exactly constitutes racial betrayal. American history is filled with instances in which prominent, successful blacks have been categorized as race traitors. While Booker T. Washington is often regarded as the quintessential “sellout” by some critics, prominent figures such as W.E.B. DuBois and Marcus Garvey also found their allegiance to black progress under question despite seemingly unassailable records as iconic “race men.”

Kennedy seeks to complicate standard discussions of racial betrayal by questioning the underlying assumptions behind such accusations. Were slaves who informed about plans for impending rebellion Uncle Toms or pragmatists unwilling to sacrifice friends and family for insurrections that seemed doomed to failure?

More here.

Berliner Philharmoniker, Conductor James Levine:

Apocalypse Now, Helicopter Attack (skip to 2:40 if you are impatient for Die Walküre):

I love the smell of Napalm in the morning:

Here is your chance to weigh in on one of the most troubling dilemmas in contemporary literary culture. I know I’m hopelessly conflicted about it. It’s the question of whether the last unpublished work of Vladimir Nabokov, which is now reposing unread in a Swiss bank vault, should be destroyed—as Nabokov explicitly requested before he died.

It’s a decision that has fallen to his sole surviving heir (and translator), Dmitri Nabokov, now 73. Dmitri has been torn for years between his father’s unequivocal request and the demands of the literary world to view the final fragment of his father’s genius, a manuscript known as The Original of Laura. Should Dmitri defy his father’s wishes for the sake of “posterity”?

For the past two years I’ve involved myself in this question in print and in e-mail correspondence with Dmitri Nabokov, but a recent communication from Dmitri to me suggests that a decision may be near. And so the time seems right to share with Slate readers my own deeply divided feelings about Dmitri’s choice and to see what they make of his dilemma.

more from Slate here.

Searle’s earliest published work was squarely in this tradition, focusing on foundational issues in the workings of ordinary language. But at the end of the 1950s he returned to America and joined the Department of Philosophy at Berkeley, where he has remained ever since. Over the years Searle has drifted away from his Oxford roots. Initially he continued his work in the philosophy of language. His first book, Speech Acts, published in 1969, developed Austin’s analysis of the different ways in which language can be used. But by the 1980s he had ceased to place language at the centre of the philosophical enterprise, and had come to regard the human mind as the more fundamental realm, with language merely the medium by which we make thought public. Moreover, there is something decidedly unOxonian about Searle’s current programme of explaining how humans fit into the world of basic science. His teachers would have viewed any such ambition as a species of American vulgarity. Oxford philosophy has long been deeply anti-scientific, regarding it as some kind of category mistake to suppose that scientific findings can in any way threaten or illuminate our everyday understanding of people.

Still, there is one respect in which Searle remains loyal to his old tutors. Whenever he is faced with a conflict between common sense and arcane philosophical doctrine, he backs common sense every time.

more from the TLS here.

Via Political Theory Daily Review, Bee Wilson in the FT:

This is a tale of two pigs. The first – let’s call him Soren – is reared in Denmark. For the first few months of his life, he lives a cramped existence in a barn. This pink, flabby creature is castrated so that his meat won’t taste too strong. When at last he is allowed outside, his only freedom is a small concrete run. At a young age, he is killed and turned into bacon, using potassium nitrate and sodium nitrite. When you put slices of him in a pan, white watery liquid runs out.

The second – let’s call him Juan – was lucky enough to be born in the Iberian peninsula. He is sleek, black and hairless, a descendant of the original wild boar. Juan spends his life munching acorns among the oak trees. By the standards of animals destined for pork, he is allowed to live a long, calm life. He is only killed when he is 20 months, oldish for a pig, after which time his flesh is cured in sea salt until his fat turns to oleic acid, a fatty acid similar to that in olive oil. Juan is now jamón ibérico de bellota . When you eat slices of him, the salty flesh melts in your mouth.

It should be perfectly obvious which pig has led a better life and makes for better food. But there is one further crucial difference between the two. Because he has had only organic feed and has not suffered the worst indignities of factory farmed pigs – overcrowding and no access to outdoor space – Soren the Danish pig ends his life in a British supermarket labelled “organic”. Whereas Juan, for technical reasons, doesn’t qualify for the organic label.

“Organic” has become a word in which we have invested many contradictory dreams about food. Organic food sales in Britain are now worth more than £2bn a year. “Organic” is a magic charm, to protect us against the squalor, the chemicals and industrial scale on which most of what we eat is produced. Like any magic charm, it can’t possibly do all we expect of it.

The graphic novel developed for the Sony PSP is also available online:

In the LRB, Eric Hobsbawm remembers Weimar Germany:

I spent the most formative time of my life, the years 1931-33, as a Gymnasiast and would-be Communist militant, in the dying Weimar Republic. Last autumn I was asked to recall that time in an online German interview under the title ‘Ich bin ein Reiseführer in die Geschichte’ (‘I am a travel guide to history’). Some weeks later, at the annual dinner of the survivors of the school I went to when I came to Britain, the no longer extant St Marylebone Grammar School, I tried to explain the reactions of a 15-year-old suddenly translated to this country in 1933. ‘Imagine yourselves,’ I told my fellow Old Philologians, ‘as a newspaper correspondent based in Manhattan and transferred by your editor to Omaha, Nebraska. That’s how I felt when I came to England after almost two years in the unbelievably exciting, sophisticated, intellectually and politically explosive Berlin of the Weimar Republic. The place was a terrible letdown.’

The cover of Eric Weitz’s excellent and splendidly illustrated Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy brings back memories.[*] It shows the old Potsdamer Platz long before its transformation into a ruin at the hands of Hitler and into Disneyland architecture in the reunified Germany. Not that daytime cafés full of men in trilbys like my uncle were the habitat of Berlin teenagers. We were more likely to think of boats on the Wannsee, a place not yet associated with planned genocide.

From the Lab Reporter:

Dr Brian Cox takes us on a tour of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva – the biggest, most complicated machine ever built. It’s costing millions of pounds and has thousands of scientists from around the world waiting to use it as part of the biggest scientific experiment ever attempted. Once switched on, it will allow scientists to recreate the conditions that existed in the first moments after the Big Bang. The film also features Brian and other CERN scientists explaining what results they hope will emerge from the most exciting scientific experiment of our time.

More films here.  [Thanks to Alom Shaha.]

Pervez Hoodbhoy in the International Herald Tribune:

A cacophony of protests in Pakistan greeted a recent statement by the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohammad ElBaradei. “I fear that chaos, or an extremist regime, could take root in that country, which has 30 to 40 warheads,” he said. He also expressed fear that “nuclear weapons could fall into the hands of extremist groups in Pakistan or Afghanistan.”

But in Pakistan, few worry. The Strategic Plans Division, which is the Pakistani agency responsible for handling nuclear weapons, exudes confidence that it can safely protect the country’s “crown jewels.” The SPD is a key beneficiary of the recently disclosed secret $100 million grant by the Bush administration, the purpose of which is to make Pakistan’s nuclear weapons safer.

This money has been put to use. Indeed, ever since Sept. 11, 2001, there has been a regular traffic of Pakistani military officers to and from the United States for coaching in nuclear safety techniques. While multiple layers of secrecy make it hard to judge success, the improvement in the SPD’s public relations is palpable. PowerPoint presentations, guided tours of military headquarters and calculated expressions of openness have impressed foreign visitors.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Judah Folkman, “the father of antiangiogenesis,” a way to starve tumors of their blood supplies, died yesterday from an apparent heart attack. He was 74 years old. Folkman, director of the Vascular Biology Program at Children’s Hospital Boston, served as the hospital’s surgeon in chief from 1967 to 1981. During his tenure, he published a groundbreaking article in The New England Journal of Medicine, suggesting that tumors require angiogenesis, the formation of new blood vessels (from established ones) to provide the nutrients their cells need to grow beyond a certain size. He had first had this insight in the 1960s when he was serving as a Navy surgeon and was tasked with developing a blood substitute that could be a lifesaver during combat. (At the time, it was cancer research dogma that tumors did not need new vessels to thrive.)

For much of the next two decades Folkman was treated as a pariah by his peers, who dismissed his theory outright. He was criticized whenever he announced a finding. To continue his unpopular research after all other funding sources dried up, he was forced to take a hefty sum—$23 million—from chemical company Monsanto. Convinced he was on the right track, he persevered in the face of adversity. By the mid-1990s the tide turned in his favor when researchers in his lab discovered that two natural proteins, angiostatin and endostatin, could effectively block angiogenesis.

More here.