“Shadow Country” is a great big book that I read in the early spring of this year as American culture celebrated a pair of monomaniacal killers, Sweeney Todd and Anton Chigurh. The central axle of Peter Matthiessen’s magnificent and capacious novel is another larger-than-life figure, E.J. Watson (Bloody Watson, Emperor Watson), who was a brave and indefatigable pioneer in the Florida Everglades and an astonishing liar and murderer.

For his renegade behavior, his rigid code for revenge, his skill with firearms, his winning volubility and, finally, his reflection, he dwarfs these other killers. Watson is at once a real man in a rough world and a figure cut from legend (some of which he encouraged). Ultimately, he represents the American conquest of the frontier, which this novel proves once and for all was not a pretty or romantic enterprise or one accompanied by fairness or justice. Watson did what he wanted when he wanted, regardless of the law as it was at the outset of the 20th century.

Such a book requires a vivid and convincing world, and Matthiessen — who knows the truth of place as well as any writer — gives us an effulgent setting here, the edge of edge, the raw and ravishing Everglades deep in Florida as the 19th century turned.

more from the LA Times Book Review here.

Quaint and antique, the cry for love of country that Sir Walter Scott made in his poem “The Lay of the Last Minstrel” is something schoolchildren quit memorizing a century ago. Its stirring theme rouses a patriot’s yearning: “Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, / Who never to himself hath said, / This is my own, my native land!”

It’s easy to forget, given the sensitivities that have been awakened in this country since 9/11, thrusting lifelong citizens under suspicion for having foreign-sounding names and subjecting visitors to the indignity of being fingerprinted, that America was conceived in a spirit of openness, as a land where people could build new identities, grounded in the present and the future, not the past. This dream, despite current fears, has in great part been made real. And the fact that America is still a place where the rest of the world comes to reinvent itself — accepting with excitement and anxiety the necessity of leaving behind the constrictions and comforts of distant customs — is the underlying theme of Jhumpa Lahiri’s sensitive new collection of stories, “Unaccustomed Earth.”

more from the NYT Book Review here.

…
The Cossacks

Linda Pastan

For Jews, the Cossacks are always coming.
Therefore I think the sun spot on my arm
is melanoma. Therefore I celebrate
New Year’s Eve by counting
my annual dead.

My mother, when she was dying,
spoke to her visitors of books
and travel, displaying serenity
as a form of manners, though
I could tell the difference.

But when I watched you planning
for a life you knew
you’d never have, I couldn’t explain
your genuine smile in the face
of disaster. Was it denial

laced with acceptance? Or was it
generations of being English–
Brontë’s Lucy in Villette
living as if no fire raged
beneath her dun-colored dress.

I want to live the way you did,
preparing for next year’s famine with wine
and music as if it were a ten-course banquet.
But listen: those are hoofbeats
on the frosty autumn air.

,,

Raymond Bonner in the New York Review of Books:

On February 11, 2008, the Pentagon announced that charges were being filed against six men in connection with the September 11 attacks, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, alleged mastermind of the attacks and one of al-Qaeda’s most senior members, and Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a leader of the Hamburg cell that included several of the September 11 pilots. It has taken nearly seven years for these men to be indicted—while more than 240 other prisoners continue to remain at Guantánamo in a state of indefinite detention without charge. In contrast, Britain, after one of the longest and most expensive trials in its history, has already convicted and sentenced four men for the failed attacks on the London subway on July 21, 2005.

Last year, British officials also arrested three other men for involvement in the deadly attacks on three London subway lines and a bus on July 7, 2005, two weeks earlier; they are scheduled to go on trial at the end of March. Spain has convicted twenty-one of twenty-eight men charged in connection with the terrorist attacks on commuter trains in Madrid in March 2004; and Indonesia has held lengthy trials and convicted four men who were accused of the terrorist attacks in Bali in October 2002, two of whom have been sentenced to death, and two to life imprisonment.

“Justice delayed is justice denied” is a guiding principle of the American criminal justice system. The Bush administration has ignored this principle with impunity, and America’s image abroad has suffered greatly as a result.

More here.

From Datawocky:

I teach a class on Data Mining at Stanford. Students in my class are expected to do a project that does some non-trivial data mining. Many students opted to try their hand at the Netflix Challenge: to design a movie recommendations algorithm that does better than the one developed by Netflix.

Here’s how the competition works. Netflix has provided a large data set that tells you how nearly half a million people have rated about 18,000 movies. Based on these ratings, you are asked to predict the ratings of these users for movies in the set that they have not rated. The first team to beat the accuracy of Netflix’s proprietary algorithm by a certain margin wins a prize of $1 million!

Different student teams in my class adopted different approaches to the problem, using both published algorithms and novel ideas. Of these, the results from two of the teams illustrate a broader point. Team A came up with a very sophisticated algorithm using the Netflix data. Team B used a very simple algorithm, but they added in additional data beyond the Netflix set: information about movie genres from the Internet Movie Database (IMDB). Guess which team did better?

More here.  [Thanks to Beajerry.]

Fareed Zakaria in the New York Times Book Review:

There are explanations for her lack of achievement — the military establishment gave her little room and maneuvered against her constantly — but still one cannot help but notice the gap between ambition and action that haunted Bhutto for most of her public life.

With the publication of “Reconciliation,” Bhutto has — alas, posthumously — closed that gap. Written while she was preparing to re-enter political life, it is a book of enormous intelligence, courage and clarity. It contains the best-written and most persuasive modern interpretation of Islam I have read. Part of what makes it compelling, of course, is the identity of its author. People have often asked when respected Muslim leaders would denounce Islamic extremism and articulate a forward-looking and tolerant view of their religion. Well, Bhutto has done it in full measure. And as the most popular political figure in the world of Islam — for three decades she led the largest political party in the second largest Muslim country — she had much greater standing than the collection of reactionary mullahs, second-rate academics and unelected monarchs who opine on these topics routinely, and are accorded far too much attention in the West. In fact, Washington should arrange to have the portions of the book about Islam republished as a separate volume and translated into several languages. It would do more to win the battle of ideas within Islam than anything an American president could ever say.

More here.

My very smart co-editor Morgan Meis in the Smart Set:

It’s not a good time to be an art critic. Much of what’s written is pale. It is weak and descriptive to no purpose. Or at the other extreme it is pure jargon, laughable if read aloud to the uninitiated. Junk. In fact, if art critics actually believed that anything we said or wrote mattered, we would probably be shooting ourselves in droves.

It is, however, a good time to be an artist. The heroic days of hard drinking at the Cedar and a fistfight with Jackson Pollock are over. But on the positive side of the ledger you can do pretty much whatever the hell you want and there’s someone out there fully prepared to take it seriously. Some lament this fact; they want a criterion back. I don’t. Critics are the owls of Minerva, flying around at dusk. We don’t command and determine the facts, and never did. Merely do we pick at corpses, sorting a few things out, making explicit what was already there, etc., etc.

The 2008 Whitney Biennial is a feast and a free-for-all as far as the artists are concerned. You can make a realist painting (for God’s sake) or you can stick some poles and a stretch of metal fence into a block of cement. The latter work being, I mention as an aside, genuinely thrilling in that it successfully evades all possibility of being pleasing to the eye.

Over at Wired (warning: spoiler alert, in article):

And then there was one. After Battlestar Galactica revealed the identities of four of the show’s “final five” human-looking Cylons at the end of Season 3, theories about the last “skin job” burned in fans’ brains.

Season 4 of SciFi Channel’s re-imagined Galactica begins with even more questions and “what the frak?” moments, and few actual answers about where the show is headed in its final season.

The Cylon revelations in the psychedelic Season 3 finale reinforced the big ideas about religion, war and what it means to be human that have made Battlestar Galactica the smartest science-fiction series on television. The Season 4 opener explores the same brainy terrain.

Galactica‘s unflinching parallels to current events in Iraq — and executive producers Ronald D. Moore’s and David Eick’s skill at crafting meticulously orchestrated cliffhangers — earned the show a prestigious Peabody Award in 2006 and have made it SciFi’s highest-rated original series to date.

There’s a reason for all the accolades: Galactica is top-tier sci-fi television, as gritty and engaging as anything on HBO or at the multiplex. Wired.com got a sneak peek at “He That Believeth in Me,” the first episode of Season 4, and offers this (mostly) spoiler-free first look at what to expect when Galactica returns today for its final season.

While I’m not a big fan of the Grateful Dead, I’m eternally grateful to Jerry Garcia for saving “The Saragossa Manuscript.” Back in the 1960s when rock music, movies, drugs, and politics were one big, simmering witch’s brew, the Polish director Wojciech Has’s “The Saragossa Manuscript” screened at the San Francisco Film Festival.

Garcia saw it, fell in love, and bought a print which he gave to the Pacific Film Archive on the condition that they would screen it for him whenever he asked. Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola also fell under the film’s spell, and eventually they all raised money to have the print restored. The resulting three-hour “Saragossa Manuscript” will screening at the Brooklyn Academy of Music for the next week, and even a cynic will quickly see how it can seduce the unwary.

more from the NY Sun here.

And then there’s Courbet (1819-1877), who occupies a category all his own. Founder and chief proponent of the school of Realism, his paintings shocked his contemporaries not because of their verity but because of their unsentimental depictions of the ordinary. Philosophically, his libertarian views were actually rather confused and self-serving, and his stated goal – “I have simply wished to assert the reasoned and independent feeling of my own individuality within a total knowledge of tradition” – could have led to the tritest of results in lesser hands. His formidable talents and focus as a painter, though, show in some of the most riveting canvases of the 19th century. His stunning gifts for recreating his environment in the plastic forces of paint – forces lending themselves poorly to theorizing or wall texts – inspired countless later artists, including Matisse and Picasso, who both owned paintings by the master.

more from artcritical here.

It is a debate you could only really have in a country that accords its intellectuals the kind of status other nations – to name no names – tend to reserve for footballers, footballers’ wives or (if they’re lucky) rock stars; a place where structuralists and relativists and postmodernists, rather than skulk shamefacedly in the shadows, get invited on to primetime TV; a culture in which even today it is considered entirely acceptable, indeed laudable, to state one’s profession as “thinker”.

That country is France, which is currently preoccupied with the fate of its ailing semicolon.

more from The Guardian here.

40 years ago today, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.  Here is his last speech, given the day before his death.

For Bibi.

From Prospect Magazine:

In late January, the Israeli novelist AB Yehoshua wrote an article in the country’s largest-circulation newspaper, Yediot Aharonot, urging the US to temporarily recall its ambassador from Israel. That act of diplomatic pique, he said, would be proof of America’s friendship to his country. The purpose, Yehoshua wrote, would be to pressure Prime Minister Olmert to evacuate the tiny West Bank settlements known as outposts, which violate Israeli and international law. Olmert and his predecessor Ariel Sharon had been promising President Bush to dismantle outposts for over three years. Olmert has publicly said that the country shames itself by not acting, but he fears the violent protests of the outpost settlers. Since most Israelis value good relations with the US, an American show of displeasure would help produce the public backing Olmert needs. “If the US is a true friend of Israel,” Yehoshua said, “it must help her through a symbolic act of protest.”

Yehoshua is an immense figure in Israeli culture. His novels are canonical. He is outspokenly dovish but firmly within the mainstream left. He is also an old-fashioned Zionist who offends diaspora Jews by saying that one can only live a full Jewish life in Israel. So the man calling for America to lean on Israel is no radical. (In fact, in Israel Yehoshua’s article promptly vanished from public notice, presumably deemed unremarkable.)

By asking for a deus ex machina to intervene in Israeli politics, Yehoshua was demonstrating the despair of Israel’s peace camp. The left’s once-forbidden positions—a two-state solution, evacuating settlements—are now boringly respectable. Olmert, a recovering rightist, supports them. But nothing happens. Why can’t a winged figure descend to get the plot moving? America has filled that role for Israel before, vetoing UN security council condemnations, providing aid. Someone simply needs to tell the gods what Israel actually needs. I write this not to mock Yehoshua but to agree with him. As a progressive Israeli, I long to see a shift in US policy. With Yehoshua, I believe that the right actions by the US could awaken public support here in Israel for the steps needed to reach peace.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Where would we be without bananas? The silent-movie industry, founded on images of men in bowler hats being launched into the air by banana skins, might never have gotten off the ground, so to speak. Kids would have to pack drippy citrus into their lunch boxes. The band Bananarama could have been the more fetid Apricotarota. When Shakespeare “let slip the dogs of war,” what do you think they slipped on? I am banana-powered. When I was growing up, my daily breakfast carried the official name of “Rice Krispies, banana and milk.” Nowadays I often tuck a banana into a pocket on my cycling shirt, for a midride potassium pick-me-up. In fact, I’m taking a short break to eat a banana right now.

Okay, I’m back. (I smeared a little peanut butter on the banana, something that doesn’t work that well while biking.) What’s my lifetime banana record? According to Dan Koeppel, author of Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World, “If you are an average American, about forty years old, you’re probably approaching banana ten thousand.” So I’m probably up to about 15,000 bananas. (Because of my age? Because I’m not average? I’m not telling.)

More here.

Over at blogginheads.tv, Joshua Knobe and Paul Bloom discuss religion and morality:

Over at the TLS, Ruth Morse reviews Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence (via bookforum):

Because this is a romance, Salman Rushdie can exploit many sources (indeed, he gives a bibliography at the end); because this is a Rushdie romance, it combines aspects of the Italian romantic epics of both Boiardo’s and Ariosto’s Orlando with Persian and South Asian story collections and legendary history. Because good storytelling also knows what not to tell, Rushdie leaves many loose ends, from the unresolved questions of the stranger’s name and parentage and his fate, to Florentine and Mughal history, to the similarly unresolved endings of many of the dozens of characters he conjures up along the way. In the rush, many stories are sketched rather than told; no character is more than a suggestion, and no speech is individual to its speaker. Some of this is possible because we know these stories already, but all of it is at the cost of any exploration of individual or situation. They are, or seek to be, their own justification – but the price is high. Rushdie’s narrator is explicit about this: most audiences can leave, or close a book; when the king is the audience, the risks are higher. Long and boring narrators will be cut.

Salman Rushdie has used his gifts to explore large themes – such as mortality, nationality, religion and love – and his bitter disappointment in their failed promises. This ninth long fiction is a pendant to the previous one, Shalimar the Clown, published in 2005. And that book reprised aspects of Fury, published in 2001. All three books use breathtakingly paced sets of plots, interlinked with back stories, delightedly offending the boundaries of verisimilitude. All repeat elements which combine stereotypes with the writer’s own obsessions: Kashmir, revenge, the longing for peaceful religious and ethnic coexistence, and a savage anger about the perpetual dying of love. Rushdie has never been afraid to use popular media such as film or thriller plots, or traditional story collections, which he pillages in order to fascinate readers with his complex inventiveness and pyrotechnic style.

Via EurekAlert!, over at Georgia Tech:

Sports professionals and fans get pretty emotional about their picks for the NCAA basketball tournament each year, and that emotion often clouds their judgment.

But three engineering professors at the Georgia Institute of Technology have created a computer ranking system, called LRMC, that consistently predicts NCAA basketball rankings more accurately than the AP poll of sportswriters and the ESPN/USA Today poll of coaches, formulas (the Ratings Percentage Index), other computer models (the Massey ratings and the Sagarin ratings), and even the tournament seeds themselves.

After correctly picking all four of this year’s finalists, the LRMC method has now identified 30 of the last 36 Final Four participants (83 percent accuracy over the past nine years of NCAA tournaments) as one of the top two teams in their region. Over the same nine-year stretch, the seedings and polls have correctly identified only 23, and the RPI indentified 21.