Almost everything most of us think we know about Cyrano de Bergerac was made up by the nineteenth-century French dramatist Edmond Rostand (1868-1918). The title role in his 1897 drama is that of a brilliant swordsman, and a poet and epigrammatist of dazzling versatility. He has an enormous nose, about which he is a good deal funnier than those who seek to mock him for it. This sense of humour owes much to the fact that he is a Gascon, who rouses the spirits of his beleaguered fellow soldiers, the alliteratively named cadets du Carbon de Castel-Jaloux, during the siege of Arras with a sentimental appeal to the beauties of the Dordogne. He falls hopelessly in love with his enchanting cousin Roxane, herself captivated by the younger and physically more prepossessing Baron Christian de Neuvillette. The tongue-tied Christian gets Cyrano to do his wooing and write his love letters for him, but is killed before Roxane can discover the truth. In the play’s final act the now elderly hero falls victim to a cowardly ambush and dies after confessing to her that the eloquent soul she worshipped as a result of Christian’s courtship was that of his long-nosed surrogate all along.

more from Literary Review here.

Every generous idea previously accepted was now despised and, in fact, blamed for failure to bring about the better world. Love, liberty, progress, the sovereign people, the brotherhood of man, and the oneness of spirit under a mysterious but manifest providence — these were now regarded as the vaporings of feeble minds or glib rhetoricians. What was true was hard matter and evil man, nothing else. Science confirmed the first of these sole realities, politics the other. Hence Realism and Materialism: “Things are in the saddle, / And ride mankind.”

Realism, moreover, was defined as the commonplace, the dull, dreary, sordid repetitious occurrences of daily life. They made anything other than soberness of word and feeling ridiculous. To be sure, the Romanticists had often felt despair; they were not fools — or blind. But their love of life was strong, and they were also gifted with the love of love; those among them who survived the debacle of 1848 kept their faith in humankind and felt it a duty to continue the fight for political freedom and social equality. Hugo, exiled on his Channel Island for eighteen years, was the chief spokesman for this “Nevertheless” attitude and thereby earned the contempt of the younger men who knew that ideas were “mere” ideas and worthless. He continued to love and worship nature; they, on the contrary, were possessed by the emotion that Roger Williams has described and analyzed in his book The Horror of Life and has shown by psychological and medical evidence to have been no affectation but fact.

more from The American Scholar here.

From Style.com:

Fashion week has spawned a new sport: extreme grooming. In Alia Raza’s film installation “The Fragile Black Blossoms Emit a Hypnotic Cascade of Tropical Perfume Whose Sweet Heady Odor Leaves Its Victim Intoxicated”—which doubled as Trasteverine’s Fall ’08 presentation—she explores the self-abandonment that can occur during intense beauty rituals. To wit, in one segment Devendra Banhart flails his arms and writhes around on the floor in a Trasteverine dress as he sprays himself with perfume for 28 minutes—the exact amount of time it takes to empty the bottle. In the second and third segments, which were screened on separate walls, Chloë Sevigny performs an involved, multistep skincare regimen for 28 minutes, and musician Jennifer Herrema of Royal Trux repeatedly shaves her legs over a bathtub for the same amount of time. At the film’s opening last night at the Greene Naftali gallery, Sevigny explained that they were partly inspired by Polanski’s psychological horror “Repulsion” (1965), in which Catherine Deneuve descends into mental illness while looking like, well, Catherine Deneuve. “I’m losing my mind in my apartment,” Sevigny says of her role. “I do a ten-step process, and in the end, I feel like I haven’t cleansed myself and start again.” We asked if the experience resonated with her. “There’s that idea [beauty rituals] can make us more beautiful, and yeah, I do it.” And for the record, Raza and her team didn’t skimp on the products they used: Sevigny slathers herself with creams from Kiehl’s and Jurlique, and that scent Banhart spritzes himself with is Tuberose from L’Artisan Parfumeur—Raza’s signature fragrance.

(Note: Congratulations to Alia Raza, my supremely gifted artist-film director niece, on this dazzling success!)

William Edward Burghardt DuBois, to his admirers, was by spirited devotion and scholarly dedication, an attacker of injustice and a defender of freedom.

A harbinger of Black nationalism and Pan-Africanism, he died in self-imposed exile in his home away from home with his ancestors of a glorious past—Africa.

Labeled as a “radical,” he was ignored by those who hoped that his massive contributions would be buried along side of him. But, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote, “history cannot ignore W.E.B. DuBois because history has to reflect truth and Dr. DuBois was a tireless explorer and a gifted discoverer of social truths. His singular greatness lay in his quest for truth about his own people. There were very few scholars who concerned themselves with honest study of the black man and he sought to fill this immense void. The degree to which he succeeded disclosed the great dimensions of the man.”

His Formative Years
W.E.B. DuBois was born on February 23, 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. At that time Great Barrington had perhaps 25, but not more than 50, Black people out of a population of about 5,000. Consequently, there were little signs of overt racism there. Nevertheless, its venom was distributed through a constant barrage of suggestive innuendoes and vindictive attitudes of its residents. This mutated the personality of young William from good natured and outgoing to sullen and withdrawn. This was later reinforced and strengthened by inner withdrawals in the face of real discriminations. His demeanor of introspection haunted him throughout his life.

While in high school DuBois showed a keen concern for the development of his race. At age fifteen he became the local correspondent for the New York Globe. And in this position he conceived it his duty to push his race forward by lectures and editorials reflecting upon the need of Black people to politicized themselves.

DuBois was naturally gifted intellectually and took pleasurable pride in surpassing his fellow students in academic and other pursuits. Upon graduation from high school, he, like many other New England students of his caliber, desired to attend Harvard. However, he lacked the financial resources to go to that institution. But with the aid of friends and family, and a scholarship he received to Fisk College (now University), he eagerly headed to Nashville, Tennessee to further his education.

This was DuBois’ first trip south. And in those three years at Fisk (1885–1888) his knowledge of the race problem became more definite. He saw discrimination in ways he never dreamed of, and developed a determination to expedite the emancipation of his people. Consequently, he became a writer, editor, and an impassioned orator. And in the process acquired a belligerent attitude toward the color bar.

Also, while at Fisk, DuBois spent two summers teaching at a county school in order to learn more about the South and his people. There he learned first hand of poverty, poor land, ignorance, and prejudice. But most importantly, he learned that his people had a deep desire for knowledge.

After graduation from Fisk, DuBois entered Harvard (via scholarships) classified as a junior. As a student his education focused on philosophy, centered in history. It then gradually began to turn toward economics and social problems. As determined as he was to attend and graduate from Harvard, he never felt himself a part of it. Later in life he remarked “I was in Harvard but not of it.” He received his bachelor’s degree in 1890 and immediately began working toward his master’s and doctor’s degree.

DuBois completed his master’s degree in the spring of 1891. However, shortly before that, ex-president Rutherford B. Hayes, the current head of a fund to educate Negroes, was quoted in the Boston Herald as claiming that they could not find one worthy to enough for advanced study abroad. DuBois’ anger inspired him to apply directly to Hayes. His credentials and references were impeccable. He not only received a grant, but a letter from Hayes saying that he was misquoted. DuBois chose to study at the University of Berlin in Germany. It was considered to be one of the world’s finest institutions of higher learning. And DuBois felt that a doctor’s degree from there would infer unquestionable preparation for ones life’s work.

During the two years DuBois spent in Berlin, he began to see the race problems in the Americas, Africa, and Asia, and the political development of Europe as one. This was the period of his life that united his studies of history, economics, and politics into a scientific approach of social research.

DuBois had completed a draft of his dissertation and needed another semester or so to finish his degree. But the men over his funding sources decided that the education he was receiving there was unsuitable for the type of work needed to help Negroes. They refused to extend him any more funds and encouraged him to obtain his degree from Harvard. Which of course he was obliged to do. His doctoral thesis, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade in America, remains the authoritative work on that subject, and is the first volume in Harvard’s Historical Series.

More here.

Robert J. Richards in American Scientist:

In the 1930s, Sigmund Freud collaborated with American ambassador William C. Bullitt to produce a psychoanalytic study of President Woodrow Wilson, which portrayed him as suffering from a libido that had been blocked of normal expression and rechanneled into a messianic identification with his father and Jesus Christ. The manuscript was finally published in 1967 to scornful and suspicious reviews. The notion that even the master of psychoanalytic technique could provide a scientific study of a man he had never met, whose history he learned at second and third hand and about whom he had an admitted prejudice, was rejected not only by the sober historian Richard Hofstadter but also by the eminent practitioner of psychobiography Erik H. Erikson. Erikson judged, on the basis of internal evidence, that very little of the final version had actually been written by Freud himself.

No such exculpating considerations appear to relieve Barbara Oakley of responsibility for Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother’s Boyfriend. Oakley, an associate professor of systems engineering, became interested in what she calls the “Machiavellian” personality as the result of long experience with the erratic and deviant behavior of the sister referred to in her title. The Machiavellian syndrome was initially defined in the 1950s and principally consists of highly manipulative behavior done without moral scruple. Studies that Oakley cites associate the syndrome with another set of traits, which also characterized her sister: those of the borderline personality disorder, which includes rapid mood swings, impulsive decisions and self-damaging actions.

More here.

J. Jeremy Wisnewski reviews Steven Miles’s book at Metapsychology:

Picture this: a prisoner is being suspended, arms tied behind his back, from a ceiling beam. He is being asked very difficult questions, some of which he seems not to understand. There is blood dripping from his nose. He is sweating profusely, and he is muttering what appears to be total nonsense. He has not eaten, or slept, for several days. He has been subject to random beatings. His situation seems hopeless.

But then: One of his interrogators motions for another man to come into the room. This man has a stethoscope and a first aid kit. He begins to listen to the prisoner’s heart. He takes his blood pressure. He flashes a small light into the prisoner’s eyes and looks at them closely. His appearance is grim as he turns to the interrogator. There is a moment of hope. “He can continue,” he says. And with that, the beatings begin again.

More here.

..
An Interpretation of the 1st Three Verses of the Tao Te Ching
by Lao Tzu

They say Lao-tzu, the author of the Tao (the way) Te Ching, lived sometime between 551-479 BCE. Nothing more conclusive can be said about this. Little is known about him, and some scholars even suggest he may have been a composite of Chinese writers of the period whose work was collected under one name. It’s all very murky. Translator, Stephen Mitchell says, “…all the information that has come down to us is highly suspect.”

Lao Tzu left no trace other than this book. But for someone who may not have existed, he’s made a lasting impression. Mitchell even calls his book, “… one of the wonders of the world.” I’m good with that.

1

If you talk about it, it’s not Tao.
If you name it, it’s something else.

What can’t be named is eternal.
Naming splits the eternal to smithereens.

Not tangled in desire you embrace the unknown.
Tangled in desire you see only what you want.

But the unknown and what you want
have one source. Call it no place.

No place or darkness.
The gate.

2

A beautiful thing means some things are ugly.
A good thing means some things are bad.
To say something is, means something is not.

What is and what is not are each other’s author.

A short thing makes a long thing long.
A high thing makes a low thing low.
Before and after form an endless loop.

So, a master’s doing is doing no thing.
A master’s saying is saying no thing.

Things come. She doesn’t grab.
Things disappear. She lets them go.

Not grabbing, she has.
Not expecting, she does.

And after work is over she walks away
having done what lasts forever.

3

If you inflate some to greatness
others necessarily diminish.
If you covet possession
you’ll create a circus for crooks.

The wise lead by hosing-out minds,
refreshing their centers, recalibrating aspiration,
and strengthening resolve.

They help others discard
what they think they know
and stupidly desire.

They create positive confusion
in order to expose false knowledge.

Go no place to do no thing
and everything you do will be a
true thing.

Interpretation by R. Bob

..

Speaking of development, Pranab Bardhan over at the Boston Review:

After more than a century of relative stagnation, the economies of India and China have been growing at remarkably high rates over the past 25 years. In 1820 the two countries contributed nearly half of the world’s income; by 1950, with the industrialized West having pulled away, their share had fallen to less than one-tenth. Today it is just less than one-fifth, and projections suggest that by 2025 it will rise to one-third. (In 2008 the World Bank is expected to issue revised numbers about cost of living in China and India, which may somewhat reduce these estimated income shares, both current and future).

The consequences of this expansion are extraordinary. The Chinese economy in particular has made the most headway against poverty in world history, with hundreds of millions of people moved out of the most extreme poverty within just a generation. (The environmental consequences are comparably remarkable, though perhaps proportionately disastrous).

What explains this strikingly rapid growth? The answer that continues to dominate public discussion in the United States runs along the following lines: decades of socialist controls and regulations stifled enterprise in India and China and led them to a dead end. A mix of market reforms and global integration finally unleashed their entrepreneurial energies. As these giants shook off their “socialist slumber,” they entered the “flattened” playing field of global capitalism. The result has been high economic growth in both countries and correspondingly large declines in poverty.

Mark Pickens over at the CGAP (the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor) blog raises the issue of how we evaluate less than best solutions in development.  I’m not quite sure where I stand.

They both re-engineer something used for decades in rich countries , rethinking every assumption to make it affordable for low-income clients. And both may be safer than the alternatives poor people are already using.

Tata announced the Nano last week as an ultra simple but stylish car costing US$2500, closer to affordable for Indian families than any other new car. To slash prices, Tata engineers questioned everything conventional wisdom said is a “must have”: why not one large windshield wiper instead of two? Why does the beam connecting the wheel to the axle need to be made of solid steel?

From Edge.org:

Click here to watch video, read transcript, and much more. Very interesting!

When Patrick Hamilton wrote to his brother, Bruce, of the “magnifying influence of beer—the neurotics’ microscope,” he wasn’t blowing smoke; he was faithfully expressing what for him had assumed the knife-sharp form of dogma. For Hamilton, one of the hardest-drinking authors of the twentieth century, there was more in his topped-off flask than the boozy business, though; he deftly mastered an entire worldview of late-’30s and early-’40s London and the precincts his working-class subjects haunted—not just the grubby alcoholism, the evenings of ale and pink gin and whiskey, and the fevered attempts to find an establishment open after last call but also the more plebeian desire for tea at the ABC shops and leviathan Lyons Corner Houses, one of which could seat five thousand teacup-holding Englishmen, their class anxiety served up amid marble staircases and the anodyne twinklings of a for-hire orchestra.

more from bookforum here.

From MSNBC:

Hot on the heels of see-through frogs, researchers at Children’s Hospital Boston have bred see-through zebrafish that put tumors and stem cells on display as they grow. The transparent lab animals already have started to provide insights into how cancer spreads – and how it can be treated – in not-so-transparent human beings. The fish breeding project and its application to medical research are described in Thursday’s issue of the journal Cell Stem Cell as well as a news release from Children’s. Zebrafish, like frogs and mice, are frequently used as experimental models for diseases and biological processes seen in humans as well.

Usually, researchers allow the animals to get a disease analogous to the human malady, then kill and dissect the animal. But when it comes to cancer progression, scientists would prefer to see how the process works in a live animal. Scientists have used transparent zebrafish embryos for that purpose, but when the fish reach adulthood, they turn opaque. That effectively closes the shutters over a valuable window for research. “Everything after four weeks has been invisible to us,” Dr. Richard White, a clinical fellow in Children’s stem cell program and an instructor of medicine at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, explained in today’s news release.

More here.

Let’s say that you’ve recently polished off your local library’s collection of vampire sonnets, and perhaps even flipped, with a melancholy hand, the final page of your older brother’s three-volume haiku sequence about a marauding colony of Minotaurs—that you’ve exhausted, in other words, the literary exploration of monster subcultures written in obscure forms. Well, take heart. Toby Barlow’s first book, Sharp Teeth, is a verse novel about werewolves. This makes it not only a decisive answer (nay!) to the age-old question “Is long-form monster poetry dead?” but also a perfect marriage of form and subject: Both the werewolf and the verse novel (which lopes across the centuries from Pushkin to Browning to Vikram Seth) are shaggy hybrids that appear once in a blue moon and terrify everyone in sight.

more from NY Magazine here.

Museology is in moral crisis after a spate of manic construction that has exalted edifices over their contents, and institutional narcissism over the romance of art lovers and art works. Witness the revamped Museum of Modern Art: it is less a building than a life-size architectural maquette, in which you and I fill the roles of little figures stuck in to convey scale. Our enjoyment of the museum’s unequalled collections feels incidental to another, mysterious purpose, perhaps known only by some executive cabal. I think that unease with the Modern helps to explain the euphoria, of everyone I know in the art world, that has come to attend any visit to the Met—a place that is not only for us but about us, as parishioners of visual high culture. Like ever fewer museum directors today, de Montebello cut his professional teeth as a curator, specializing in European paintings. The open secret of his success is a deep feel for the seriousness, and an identification with the enthusiasm, of his curatorial team. He trusts and abets their yearnings to connect. The payoff is a museum that honors the variety and the alacrity of our interests and appetites, and by “our” I mean that of all who vote with their feet to be present. (Met crowds, though inconveniencing, impart a sweetness of democratic participation like that of the first half hour or so of showing up for jury duty.) With gladness, I note a tincture of that quality in the compact, vernacular spaces and the curatorial tact of an inaugural show of assembled sculpture and collage at the relocated New Museum of Contemporary Art. The New Museum also palpably credits viewers with a will and a right to uncoerced experience. So it can be done, with or without marble pilasters. The tipoff is that you don’t find yourself wondering why anything is designed or presented in the way that it is. To look is to get it.

more from The New Yorker here.

Wood’s criticism has its own knowing relationship with embarrassment. As a critic, he is able to point out things about texts that are, in retrospect, blindingly, even embarrassingly, obvious. His book is brilliant in many ways, particularly in its analysis of the tired jargon that surrounds much formal criticism of the novel. Narrators, he points out, for instance, are very rarely “omniscient”; “free indirect style” is anything but free. Indeed, what is impressive about How Fiction Works is its practical utility. As Wood writes, “I try to ask some of the essential questions about the art of fiction. Is realism real? How do we define a successful metaphor? What is a character? When do we recognise a brilliant use of detail in fiction?”. The problem with general discussions about fiction is that it is hard enough to write about the details of one novel, let alone to comprehend an entire mode. Wood gets round this sense of enormity (what Pierre Bayard terms “the embarrassment around the work”) by resisting taxonomy. Breaking his thoughts down into aphoristic pieces, he concentrates his arguments around a select group of novels. “This little book”, he tells us, is about works he “actually owns”. All his examples are drawn from “the books at hand” in his study. After reading How Fiction Works, one learns that the authors represented in Wood’s study include, among others, D. H. Lawrence, Saul Bellow, Thomas Hardy, Knut Hamsun, Stendhal, Ian McEwan, Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, Henry James, John le Carré, David Foster Wallace and large quantities of Flaubert.

more from the TLS here.

..

In the Hall of Bones
Ted Kooser

Here we store the reassembled
scaffolding, the split, bleached uprights,
the knobby corner locks and braces
that held up the mastadon’s
bag of wet leaves and the ivory
forklift of its head. Over there are
the planks upon which lay the turtle’s
diving bell, and the articulated
rack that kept the dromedary’s hump
from collapsing under the weight
of its perserverance. And here is
the basket that held the clip-clop
pulse of the miniature horse
as it dreamed of growing tall enough
to have lunch from a tree. And then
here’s man, all matchsticks, wooden spoons
and tongue depressors wired together,
a rack supporting a leaky jug
of lust and worry. Of all the skeletons
assembled here, this is the only one
in which once throbbed a heart
made sad by brooding on its shadow.

..

Nat Turner was born on October 2, 1800, in Southampton County, Virginia, the week before Gabriel was hanged. While still a young child, Nat was overheard describing events that had happened before he was born. This, along with his keen intelligence, and other signs marked him in the eyes of his people as a prophet “intended for some great purpose.” A deeply religious man, he “therefore studiously avoided mixing in society, and wrapped [him]self in mystery, devoting [his] time to fasting and praying.”

In 1821, Turner ran away from his overseer, returning after thirty days because of a vision in which the Spirit had told him to “return to the service of my earthly master.” The next year, following the death of his master, Samuel Turner, Nat was sold to Thomas Moore. Three years later, Nat Turner had another vision. He saw lights in the sky and prayed to find out what they meant. Then “… while laboring in the field, I discovered drops of blood on the corn, as though it were dew from heaven, and I communicated it to many, both white and black, in the neighborhood; and then I found on the leaves in the woods hieroglyphic characters and numbers, with the forms of men in different attitudes, portrayed in blood, and representing the figures I had seen before in the heavens.”

At the beginning of the year 1830, Turner was moved to the home of Joseph Travis, the new husband of Thomas Moore’s widow. His official owner was Putnum Moore, still a young child. Turner described Travis as a kind master, against whom he had no complaints. Then, in February, 1831, there was an eclipse of the sun. Turner took this to be the sign he had been promised and confided his plan to the four men he trusted the most, Henry, Hark, Nelson, and Sam. They decided to hold the insurrection on the 4th of July and began planning a strategy. However, they had to postpone action because Turner became ill.

On August 21, Turner and six of his men met in the woods to eat a dinner and make their plans. At 2:00 that morning, they set out to the Travis household, where they killed the entire family as they lay sleeping. They continued on, from house to house, killing all of the white people they encountered. Turner’s force eventually consisted of more than 40 slaves, most on horseback.

Nat Turner hid in several different places near the Travis farm, but on October 30 was discovered and captured. His “Confession,” dictated to physician Thomas R. Gray, was taken while he was imprisoned in the County Jail. On November 5, Nat Turner was tried in the Southampton County Court and sentenced to execution. He was hanged, and then skinned, on November 11.

In total, the state executed 55 people, banished many more, and acquitted a few. The state reimbursed the slaveholders for their slaves. But in the hysterical climate that followed the rebellion, close to 200 black people, many of whom had nothing to do with the rebellion, were murdered by white mobs. In addition, slaves as far away as North Carolina were accused of having a connection with the insurrection, and were subsequently tried and executed.

The state legislature of Virginia considered abolishing slavery, but in a close vote decided to retain slavery and to support a repressive policy against black people, slave and free.

More here.

Scott McLemee in Inside Higher Ed on the Avakian ad:

In the weeks since it appeared, a few friends who knew of my longstanding fascination with the Chairman Bob phenomenon asked about the New York Review ad. They were surprised to see it, and wondered whether all these people had actually taken up the cause of Avakianism.

My best guess, rather, was that very few of the signatories had read much Avakian. The abundance and verbosity of his pamphlets would exceed the stamina of any but the most disciplined of revolutionary intellectuals. What probably happened, I surmised, was that party cadres had pointed out various anti-Bush statements by Avakian in order to harvest a bunch of signatures from people who were angered by the course of recent history.

At the same time, it was easy to imagine how other people would probably understand the ad. They would look at it and conclude that the signatories were, in fact, hardcore militants looking to Avakian for leadership in establishing a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry.

The belief that academia contains literally tens of thousands of such people has, of course, no basis in reality. But it is evidently quite profitable. There is an audience for such claims (the rate of propagation of suckers-per-minute having intensified since P.T. Barnum’s day) and it constitutes a more robust market than the one for Marxist-Leninist pamphlets. One pictures right-wing interns stuffing envelopes with reprinted copies of the NYRB advertisement and sending it to the hinterlands – and humming “We’re in the Money” all the while.