This guy never ceases to amaze me. Here he is, pushing eighty, and instead of dimming the lights and shuffling off to somber senescence, he’s upping the ante and teaching new dance steps.

T. S. Eliot said that the job of poets and saints is “to apprehend / The point of intersection of the timeless / With time.” This job description can be applied as well to the work undertaken by the last of the great philologists, Ernst Robert Curtius and Erich Auerbach, both of whom passed from this world in the late 1950s, just as George Steiner was beginning his academic career as a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and working on his first book.

If Curtius and Auerbach can be said to have an heir, it is Steiner, who has surpassed them in his investigation of the crossroad where time and timelessness breathe as one. Curtius and Auerbach were clinical in dissecting the historical, literary, and linguistic knowledge they commanded. Steiner has ventured further, wandering from academic confines to where mysterious wildflowers, germinated by Heraclitean and Gnostic elements, blossom forth in light and shadow. Where Curtius and Auerbach illuminated, Steiner has been a weaver of illuminations.

more from Bookforum here.

..

   Backdrop Addresses Cowboy
Margaret Atwood

Starspangled cowboy
sauntering out of the almost-
silly West, on your face
a porcelain grin,
tugging a papier-mâché cactus
on wheels behind you with a string,

you are innocent as a bathtub
of bullets.

Your righteous eye, your laconic
trigger-fingers
people the streets with villains:
as you move, the air in front of you
blossoms with targets

and you leave behind you an heroic
trail of desolation:
beer bottles
slaughtered by the side
of the road, bird-
skulls bleaching the sunset.

I ought to be watching
from behind a cliff or a cardboard storefront
when the shooting starts, hands clasped
in admiration,
but I am elsewhere.

Then what about me

what about the I
confronting you on that border
you are always trying to cross?

I am the horizon
you ride towards, the thing you can never lasso

I am also what surrounds you
my brain
scattered with your
tincans, bones, empty shells,
the litter of your invasions.

I am the space you desecrate
as you pass through.

..

From The Times:

Sameem Ali’s life is as neat and tidy as the small red-brick terraced house in which she lives in Moss Side, Manchester. She’s a first-time author, a happily married mother of two grown-up sons and, since organising her neighbours to lobby the city council to spend £1 million to clean up their area, renovate houses, plant trees and stop fly-tipping, a busy councillor. “This is my community now,” Sameem says. Even her book is called Belonging, but that is where the neatness ends and something altogether more alarming and brutal takes it place. “To this day I cry when I remember all the things that were done to me,” she says. “My memories are not a comfort to me, a place to retreat to; they are a curse.”

In Belonging, Sameem tells how she was abused by her family, taken to Pakistan at the age of 13 and forced to marry a man who would rape her repeatedly. She was pregnant by the time she was 14, but at the age of 17 she escaped her family and, a few months later, a kidnap attempt by armed men hired to bring her back. Years later she was told that a 5cm tumour had lodged itself in her head. If it were a novel, you would think it far-fetched, but the horror of her forced marriage happened exactly as Sameem tells it and her story is not unique. What is unique is that she has broken a taboo to expose the abuse suffered by many young people in Britain.

“I want to inspire women to have a voice, whatever they are going through,” says the 38-year-old. “It was many years before I raised my voice.”

More here.

From The New York Times:

THE SEXUAL PARADOX Men, Women, and the Real Gender Gap

by Susan Pinker.

Why do girls on average lead boys for all their years in the classroom, only to fall behind in the workplace? Do girls grow up and lose their edge, while boys mature and gain theirs?

Pinker, a psychologist and a columnist at The Globe and Mail in Canada, is careful to remind her readers that statistics say nothing about the choices women and men make individually. Nor does she entirely discount the effect of sex discrimination or culture in shaping women’s choices. But she thinks these forces play only a bit part. To support this, Pinker quotes a female Ivy League law professor: “I am very skeptical of the notion that society discourages talented women from becoming scientists,” the professor writes. “My experience, at least from the educational phase of my life, is that the very opposite is true.” If women aren’t racing to the upper echelons of science, government and the corporate world despite decades of efforts to woo them, Pinker argues, then it must be because they are wired to resist the demands at the top of those fields.

Thus, Pinker parks herself firmly among “difference” feminists. Women’s brains aren’t inferior, she argues, but they vary considerably from men’s, and this is the primary explanation for the workplace gender divide. Women care more about intrinsic rewards, they have broader interests, they are more service-oriented and they are better at gauging the effect they have on others. They are “wired for empathy.” These aren’t learned traits; they’re the result of genes and hormones. Beginning in utero, men are generally exposed to higher levels of testosterone, driving them to be more competitive, assertive, vengeful and daring. Women, meanwhile, get a regular dose of oxytocin, which helps them read people’s emotions, “the truest social enabler.” Then there’s prolactin, which, along with oxytocin, surges during pregnancy, breast-feeding and caretaking. Together, the hormones produce such a high that mother rats choose their newborns over cocaine.

More here.

In his rhapsodic 1840 lecture on Dante and Shakespeare, “The Hero as Poet,” Thomas Carlyle wrote: “Yes, truly, it is a great thing for a Nation that it get an articulate voice; that it produce a man who will speak forth melodiously what the heart of it means!” The poet alone (“King Shakespeare”) rather than brute military or political authority, he insisted, had the metaphoric power to hold together the British Empire. Russia, whose czar ruled over great tracts of land, offered nothing but “dumb greatness.”

Carlyle proved wrong about Russia, but he was right about literature. Growing up in Bulgaria in the 1990s, soon after the Soviet government had loosened its hold and the West had offered its hand, I cheerfully fell under the influence of Russian and English writers. The only time Bulgarian literature held me in its grip was when it put me to sleep. I simply could not hear an “articulate voice,” much as I strained to; nobody managed to express “what the heart of it means.” While high school teachers tried to seduce me, day after day, with the beauties of our native tradition, I furtively held a volume of Keats under my desk. In a small Balkan country, where lack of interest in propagating one’s cultural heritage could be interpreted as a desecration of the national Priapus, that was a mortal sin.

more from Boston Review here.

Dry ice billowed across the main stage at the Knitting Factory on Tuesday night, bathing the audience in a pale, sepulchral mist. Stacks of amplifiers groaned like lungs caked in black fuzz. Short, choppy guitar shards spat furiously, while thick bass chords oozed beneath the seismic shudder of the drums. Few bands alive make the walls sweat like Boris.

The Japanese trio, which has been gigging in one form or another since 1992, has become more prevalent on the American rock club circuit since the breakthrough success of its 2005 album “Pink” (Southern Lord). The recording sold about 15,000 copies to the kinds of fans who would not likely be seen at Ozzfest, the annual tour that serves as a summit for everything heavy metal. Indeed, the crowd that jammed into the Knitting Factory this week qualified as more nerdy than diabolical, despite its excess of facial hair.

more from the NY Sun here.

Shumi Bose in The Architect’s Journal:

The most entertaining story by far in the papers is that of veiled Swedish neo-imperialism, quashing the spirit of neighbours in Denmark. And the battle tactics involve not the warships of yore, nor even the default UEFA points of last year; this time it’s IKEA.

In a deliciously cerebral and insidious move, the undermining of Danes is occurring even in the homes of millions of unsuspecting buyers, via the naming of Ikea’s product range. We’re all familiar with Ikea’s products (stop pretending), which are named rather than anonymously numbered, to suit their bright, cuddly and personable image. However, everything is political, even the friendliest of flatpack furniture. The Daily Mail reports on a study conducted at University of Copenhagen. which revealed that while other Nordic countries – Sweden, Norway and Finland – lend their words and place names to prestige products, for example the Stockholm sofa, or the Lillehammer bed, those named after Danish towns are less than glamorous.

Toilet seats, rugs, and doormats are providing the new semiotics of scorn; for example, you might rest your rear on an Oresund in the WC, which though lovely, is less than flattering to the beautiful Danish Oresund bridge; Niva in Denmark is not even worthy to give its name to an ornamental rug, being instead a roll of carpet underlay.

More here.  [Thanks to Jaffer Kolb.]

John Lanchester in The New Yorker:

So taste is mainly smell, and smell is a profound mystery. Why is it that one molecule

smells of spearmint, while its mirror image

smells of caraway? No one knows. When scientists create new molecules in the laboratory, they may know every detail of a molecule’s structure yet have no clue about what it will smell like. In 1991, scientists discovered the family of genes responsible for the nose’s roughly three hundred and fifty olfactory receptors; these, in combination, are what detect the presence of molecules and allow the brain to translate them into sensory experiences—so H₂S, hydrogen sulfide, hits the receptors and our brain tells us that we are in the presence of rotten eggs.

A trained nose can become very, very good at isolating these sensory experiences and matching them with the relevant molecules. Theoretically, every known odorant molecule could have an agreed descriptor. The descriptor wouldn’t need to be in words: it could be a number, so that the wintergreen scent of methyl salicylate would be 172, say, and the garlicky odor of allicin would be 402. That would be the beginnings of a fully scientific language of taste—a joyless, inhuman prospect.

More here.

Eric Ormsby in the New York Sun:

W. H. Auden sailed for New York on January 19, 1939. He would remain in America off and on until of the last his year of his life, becoming an American citizen in 1946. Auden was roundly criticized for leaving England when he did; after all, the1930s had been dubbed “The Age of Auden,” and even admirers of his poetry saw his departure as an unpardonable — and cowardly — defection in time of war. The criticism still simmers. Last year, during the centenary celebrations of his birth, the charges against Auden were occasionally resurrected in articles and letters to the press, often with lingering bitterness. In hindsight, it seems clear that Auden’s motives were far more complicated — and personal — than his critics assumed. Still, the blithe lightheartedness of his departure at such a moment suggested at best a surprising callousness in so socially conscious a poet.

America seems to have been irresistible to the young Auden. It not only offered a fresh start, but afforded him the chance to grow in new ways. In a sense, he was sailing away from the predictably public figure he had become toward some undiscovered destination within himself. America encouraged the introvert in him, he wrote, adding — amazingly enough — that “all Americans are introverts.” The Auden who arrived on these shores was in certain respects as clueless as Columbus.

More here.

From Prospect Magazine:

Let me confess to a pinprick of irritation at the emergence of Barack Obama as the first truly credible non-white candidate for president of the US. To begin with, there’s the problem of wearily having to answer my white friends’ plaintive question each time a significant black figure shoots across the American firmament: “Why can’t we have a British Obama (or Martin Luther King or Malcolm X or Oprah Winfrey)?” The implied challenge to black Britons in public life is: why can’t you be more like him/her?

The answer is simple. At a personal level, few people are as charismatic, capable and ruthless as this mixed-race political phenomenon. And anyone can do the maths: the black British population is proportionately one sixth the size of the black US population, so it’s hardly surprising that black Britons don’t produce the same range of talents.

But there’s history too. British whites don’t carry the stain of transatlantic slavery in the personal way that US whites do, and as a result race—specifically anti-black racism—does not play the same part in our story. Black Britons can’t bring centuries of white guilt to bear with the devastating impact that African-Americans have done for two generations. For the most part, we have been here for less than 60 years. British whites distanced themselves from the historic crime that still torments America long before we arrived. Few Britons ever owned slaves here; the blood remained on hands thousands of miles away. Britain’s black population is probably better compared to some of the less successful Latino communities of the US southwest.

More here.

From Scientific American:

On May 29, 1919, two British expeditions, positioned on opposite sides of the planet, aimed telescopes at the sun during a total eclipse. Their mission: to test a radical theory of gravity dreamed up by a former patent clerk, who predicted that passing starlight should bend toward the sun. Their results, announced that November, vaulted Albert Einstein into the public consciousness and confirmed one of the most spectacular experimental successes in the history of science. In recent decades, however, some science historians have argued that astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington, the junior member of the 1919 expedition, believed so strongly in Einstein’s theory of general relativity that he discounted data that clashed with it. In 1919 general relativity was on the cusp of eclipsing Sir Isaac Newton’s law of universal gravitation, put forth in 1687. Newton’s law cast gravity as a type of bond between objects, all floating within the gridlike arena of space and time. Einstein’s insight was that gravity is the grid, which is wrapped by massive objects such as the sun. As a consequence, light passing the sun should literally fall toward it like a moon rover clipping the edge of a giant crater and falling in.

Eddington, then director of the University of Cambridge Observatory, convinced his senior colleague and England’s Astronomer Royal, Sir Frank Dyson, to mount the expedition. The group split into two teams: Dyson’s crew from what was then the Royal Observatory in Greenwich headed to the town of Sobral, Brazil, as Eddington and cohorts set up on the western African island of Príncipe. Their task was to independently record the positions of the stars near the moon-blotted sun and compare them with the positions of the same stars at night.

If general relativity was right, the apparent positions of the nearest stars would drift 1.75 arc seconds (a measure of angularity) closer to its rim during the eclipse (a pencil width seen at half a mile). Eddington was hampered by overcast skies on the long-awaited day and photographed only five stars. It was too few for a solid result, but he gave some weight to his final value of 1.61 arc seconds. Dyson’s team had mixed results. One of the group’s two telescopes functioned correctly and gave them a value of 1.98 arc seconds. The second instrument yielded a value of  0.93 arc second, which was rather close to the Newtonian prediction of 0.87. The instrument, however, had lost focus during the eclipse, which cast doubt on the accuracy of the photo comparison, so they excluded the measurement from their final result. Based on the remaining evidence, they declared general relativity triumphant.

More here. (Note: This article is for Abbas whose birthday present to me one year was to fly to Chicago and explain The Theory of Special Relativity to me!)

…

Moto Perpetuo
Dionisio D.  Martinez

1
I’ve been walking in circles for what seems like days.
They’ve been playing Paganini, but you know

how intermittent the conscious ear
can be.  How selective.  Walking has nothing to do

with distance as clearly as Paganini
has nothing to do with the violin that plays him hard.

2
How it hurt Jackson Pollock, during his black
and white period, to hear the critics say

that he was painting black on white; how important
the gaps and absences were to him;

how crucial the distances; the gulf; how
critical each emptiness to each composition.

3
There is that moment in, say, the finale of Beethoven’s
Fifth, when you hear nothing between the various

false endings, so you make your own music,
a bridge of silence from one illusion

to the next.  A deeper and more refined
ear —Beethoven’s ear— takes care of this.

..

Christopher Beam in Slate:

The past month has not been kind to literary fabricators. The self-proclaimed half-Native American/foster child/South Central gangster Margaret B. Jones turned out to be Margaret Seltzer, a white girl from the leafy suburb Sherman Oaks. Misha Defonseca confessed that her Holocaust memoir, in which she traversed Europe, escaped Nazis, and lived with a pack of wolves, was a fantasy. Both revelations recall the fallout after James Frey’s 2003 addiction memoir A Million Little Pieces turned out to be partially fabricated.

Lying to readers and editors is shameful, to be sure. But the real embarrassment is that these writers got caught. For all their celebrated imagination, fabulists too often do a shoddy job of covering their tracks. Examine the trajectories of disgraced memoirists and you start to see some patterns that could, if studied closely, help avoid future literary humiliations. To that end, here are a few tips for aspiring fakers to keep in mind, lest they get caught in fabricante delicto.

Specificity is your enemy. Write with passionate vagueness. Avoid precise dates; don’t get more exact than the year if you can help it. Better yet, the decade. One scholar challenged the authenticity of Misha Defonseca’s memoir based on her claim that her family was deported from Belgium in 1941—in reality, the Germans didn’t deport Belgian Jews until 1942. Frey was undone when the Smoking Gun discovered he had spent only a few hours in jail, not three months. When in doubt, go with “awhile.”

Don’t tell anyone—especially your biographer. Another point that should be obvious. But none other than Nadine Gordimer made the mistake of confessing to her biographer, Ronald Suresh Roberts, that she had fabricated parts of an autobiographical essay published in The New Yorker in 1954. She hasn’t denied his account but accused Roberts of a breach of trust. Ahem.

More here.  And see also this: “The Fog of Memoir: The feud over the truthfulness of Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone“.

“[Progessives] believe that this election should be another referendum on the war, and, perhaps even more important, about the way America was misled into that war. That belief is one reason many progressives fervently support Barack Obama, an early war opponent, even though his domestic platform is somewhat to the right of Mrs. Clinton’s.”  That’s Paul Krugman in today’s NYT, talking directly to the position of many, many people I know.  His case for Clinton:

As an early war opponent myself, I understand their feelings. But should and ought don’t win elections. And polls show that the economy has overtaken Iraq as the public’s biggest concern.

True, the news from Iraq will probably turn worse again. Meanwhile, a hefty majority of voters continue to say that the war was a mistake, and people are as angry as ever about the $10 billion a month wasted on the neocons’ folly.

Yet for the time being, public optimism about Iraq is rising: 53 percent of the public believes that the United States will definitely or probably succeed in achieving its goals. So anger about the war isn’t likely to be decisive in the election.

The state of the economy, on the other hand, could well give Democrats a huge advantage — especially, to be blunt about it, with white working-class voters who supported President Bush in 2004.

Even at its best, the Bush economy left most voters unimpressed: only once, in January 2007, did a slight majority of those questioned by the USA Today/Gallup poll describe the economy as “excellent” or “good,” rather than “only fair” or “poor.” A year later, only 19 percent of voters had a good word for the economy.

This collapse in economic confidence has occurred even though the full economic effects of the implosion of the housing market and the freezing of the credit markets have yet to be felt. As more things fall apart, perceptions will only get worse.

Colin Dayan in the Boston Review:

On June 29, 2006, in the case of Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the U.S. Supreme Court granted habeas corpus protection to prisoners held by the American military at Guantánamo Bay. The court ruled that the military commissions created by the Bush administration to hear detainees’ cases violated the Geneva Conventions. It recognized that international law requires a “regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples,” and forbids treatment of prisoners that is “inhumane,” “humiliating,” “degrading.”

One day earlier, in Beard v. Banks, the court had ruled that prisoners in the highest-security unit of Pennsylvania’s State Correctional Institution in Pittsburgh do not have a First Amendment right to newspapers, magazines, and personal photographs.

The Hamdan decision was rightly celebrated by human-rights advocates, but the previous day’s decision received virtually no attention. The oversight is unfortunate. Domestic prison cases often portend future legal developments: past Supreme Court decisions about which punishments count as cruel and unusual-and which do not-were cited in the torture memos that prepared the ground for Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo. Although decisions about the rights of prisoners get little public attention, they have a powerful effect on the policies of penal institutions, both in the United States and in other countries that are either willing or unwilling recipients of our attention. In this light, Beard v. Banks demands our attention.

Jordan Ellenberg in Wired:

In October 2006, Netflix announced it would give a cool seven figures to whoever created a movie-recommending algorithm 10 percent better than its own. Within two weeks, the DVD rental company had received 169 submissions, including three that were slightly superior to Cinematch, Netflix’s recommendation software. After a month, more than a thousand programs had been entered, and the top scorers were almost halfway to the goal.

But what started out looking simple suddenly got hard. The rate of improvement began to slow. The same three or four teams clogged the top of the leaderboard, inching forward decimal by agonizing decimal. There was BellKor, a research group from AT&T. There was Dinosaur Planet, a team of Princeton alums. And there were others from the usual math powerhouses — like the University of Toronto. After a year, AT&T’s team was in first place, but its engine was only 8.43 percent better than Cinematch. Progress was almost imperceptible, and people began to say a 10 percent improvement might not be possible.

Then, in November 2007, a new entrant suddenly appeared in the top 10: a mystery competitor who went by the name “Just a guy in a garage.” His first entry was 7.15 percent better than Cinematch; BellKor had taken seven months to achieve the same score. On December 20, he passed the team from the University of Toronto. On January 9, with a score 8.00 percent higher than Cinematch, he passed Dinosaur Planet.

The debate between Chinese intellectuals will continue to swirl within think tanks, journals and universities and—on more sensitive topics—on the internet. Chinese thinkers will continue to act as intellectual magpies, adapting western ideas to suit their purposes and plundering selectively from China’s own history. As China’s global footprint grows, we may find that we become as familiar with the ideas of Zhang Weiying and Wang Hui, Yu Keping and Pan Wei, Yan Xuetong and Zheng Bijan as we were with those of American thinkers in previous decades; from Reaganite economists in the 1980s to the neoconservative strategists of the 9/11 era.

China is not an intellectually open society. But the emergence of freer political debate, the throng of returning students from the west and huge international events like the Olympics are making it more so. And it is so big, so pragmatic and so desperate to succeed that its leaders are constantly experimenting with new ways of doing things. They used special economic zones to test out a market philosophy. Now they are testing a thousand other ideas—from deliberative democracy to regional alliances. From this laboratory of social experiments, a new world-view is emerging that may in time crystallise into a recognisable Chinese model—an alternative, non-western path for the rest of the world to follow.

more from Prospect magazine here.

His Illegal Self is a little book in the way that raspberries or bees or nuggets of uranium are little. It is shorter than Peter Carey’s best-known books, Oscar and Lucinda and True History of the Kelly Gang, both of which are epics of almost uncanny originality set in the nineteenth century, and both of which won the Booker Prize. The new novel takes place in the more recent past, the early 1970s, and unlike much of Carey’s previous work, which is exhilarating in its scope, His Illegal Self is exhilarating partly because the depth of field has narrowed so dramatically. Reading this novel, Carey’s tenth, is like peering at the human heart, at the world itself, through the distorted precision of a magnifying glass—one carried in the pocket of a seven-year-old boy. Carey’s characters are often accidental outlaws. In His Illegal Self, the adventurer and outlaw is a child.

more from the NYRB here.

Is the greatest writer in the English language primarily a poet or a dramatist? The easy answer, that he is both, is no answer at all. The better one, which most practicing poets of whatever age have endorsed, is that he is a poet who, wonderfully well equipped at adapting stories and devising theatrical situations, also can tame the lightning of poetry for stage performance. Readers and recitalists who have mouthed their way through “The quality of mercy is not strained”, “Time hath my lord, a wallet at his back” and “We are such stuff as dreams are made on”, feel him as a poet, and leave it to the literary critics, philosophers and historians to create their special edifices of illumination from his works. At least the poems cut from his plays don’t seem like fish on dry land the way that “Voi che sapete”, “Nessun dorma” and “When I am Laid in Earth” do when set adrift from their operas.

more from the TLS here.

From Scientific American:

Scientific literature has been littered with studies over the past 40 years documenting the superior language skill of girls, but the biologic reason why has remained a mystery until now.
Researchers report in the journal Neuropsychologia that the answer lies in the way words are processed: Girls completing a linguistic abilities task showed greater activity in brain areas implicated specifically in language encoding, which decipher information abstractly. Boys, on the other hand, showed a lot of activity in regions tied to visual and auditory functions, depending on the way the words were presented during the exercise.

The finding suggests that although linguistic information goes directly to the seat of language processing in the female brain, males use sensory machinery to do a great deal of the work in untangling the data. In a classroom setting, it implies that boys need to be taught language both visually (with a textbook) and orally (through a lecture) to get a full grasp of the subject, whereas a girl may be able to pick up the concepts by either method.

More here.