Kevin McGoogan reviews Reinhold Kramer’s Mordecai Richler: Leaving St. Urbain in The Globe and Mail:

Reinhold Kramer, an English professor at Brandon University, has scoured the Richler archive at the University of Calgary. He has made excellent, almost invasive use of letters, notes and two unpublished manuscripts – a 1950s novel called The Rotten People and a 1970s memoir, Back to Ibiza – to show how Richler drew on his own life in creating his fiction.

By adding a few interviews with family members, and drawing on an oral biography by Globe and Mail writer Michael Posner and a scholarly study by Victor Ramraj, Kramer has produced a meticulous, prodigiously detailed biography. As the subtitle suggests, it highlights the writer’s lifelong engagement with Orthodox Judaism and his triumphant emergence as a secular humanist.

Those who followed Richler closely, chuckling at his antics, savouring his victories, will enjoy reliving old favourite moments. Yes, yes, let’s go again to the movie premiere of Duddy Kravitz, when the wife of the late Samuel Bronfman congratulated Richler from on high: “You’ve come a long way for a St. Urbain Street boy.” And the author responded: “And you’ve come a long way for a bootlegger’s wife.”

I’m not so sure if this is any improvement on Dawkins’ definition.  Steve Davis in Secular Web Kiosk:

In 1943 the eminent physicist Erwin Schrodinger gave a series of lectures in Dublin that were later published in book form under the title What is Life? Its success was considerable as it kick-started the new field of molecular biology, but Schrodinger deliberately avoided an investigation into a definition of life, believing that the time was not ripe.

In more recent times, Fred Adams, professor of physics at Michigan University, in The Origins of Existence–How Life Emerged in the Universe, wrestled manfully with this question, but he eventually concluded that “Achieving a universal definition of life is unquestionably of fundamental importance, but no such definition has yet been forthcoming.”[1]

There is a noticeable reluctance among scientists to grapple with this question of life. All are happy to speculate about the conditions that need to exist for life to originate, but none seem inclined to actually define life itself. In The Selfish Gene, for example, Richard Dawkins devoted a page or so to explaining the conditions necessary for its origin, then stated that “At some point a particularly remarkable molecule was formed by accident.”[2] He then went on to speculate about the further development of this molecule that he calls a replicator, but failed to explain to his readers what life actually is. A strident critic of Dawkins, Professor Gabriel Dover, in his wonderfully quirky but scientifically illuminating Dear Mr. Darwin, described the conditions necessary for life from a galactic viewpoint, but like Dawkins he omitted a definition.[3] Professor Freeman Dyson, another critic of selfish gene theory, in his excellent Origins of Life, did go so far as to provide the characteristics of life, as did Fred Adams, but these characteristics provide a description, not a definition. These approaches seem to typify the attitude of the scientific community to what appears to be perceived as a difficult subject, but as we press on I hope to show that perception to be misplaced.

Zakes Mda in The Boston Review:

When J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians was published in 1980, it marked a literary paradigm shift. Until then conventional wisdom dictated that South African novels could bear witness to the truth of apartheid only through realism. Whereas South African dramatists had developed over several decades a highly stylized and experimental theater that drew from both African performance modes and European models, fiction writers stubbornly stuck to a faithful reproduction of South African experience. Reflecting realist aesthetic commitments, and ignoring the mix of experimentalism and political engagement in South African theater, they held that art was not for its own sake, but a weapon in the struggle for freedom and human betterment.

Then came Coetzee.

Waiting for the Barbarians upset the expectations of many readers and critics who had grown accustomed to documentary representations of South Africa from the country’s interpreters. The novel was seen as the height of self-indulgence: life under apartheid demanded that writers create a translucent window through which the outside world could see authentic oppression. Some critics claimed that Coetzee’s use of allegory was an escape from South African reality because the novel, set in a nameless empire and lacking specificity of locale and period, was susceptible to an ahistorical and apolitical reading. The question of the author’s political commitment was raised not only in response to this novel but all his subsequent ones. Even Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer weighed in that Coetzee’s work, and indeed Coetzee himself, abhorred all political and revolutionary solutions. While acknowledging that Coetzee’s work was magnificent, and commending his superb and fearless creative energy, she rapped him on the knuckles for a mode of storytelling that kept him aloof from the grubby and tragic events of South Africa.

///
Love Song
Julie King

My father is dying, and my mother
has never been so in love. It’s not

over death she’s swooning;
it’s the sweetness that has softened

him. She lotions and socks his feet, shaves
his cheeks so he’s fresh for their evening

date in the dusk-quilted bed, the oxygen
tank murmuring in the background.

As she fine-tunes the tubes in his nostrils,
she smooths his wisps, sighs, “Oh, sweetheart.”

///

From Science:

For most overweight people, excess fat sits in one of two areas: deep inside the abdomen (visceral fat) or around the hips and legs (subcutaneous fat). Researchers have recognized for some time that visceral fat is the greater evil. People with lots of it are much more prone to diabetes, heart disease, and other problems than people with excess subcutaneous fat. But it’s not clear exactly why. Is the fat itself different, or does its location in the body matter?

To probe this question, C. Ronald Kahn, director of obesity research at the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston, and his colleagues devised a relatively simple experiment. They transplanted fat in 42 naturally plump, healthy mice. The mice were divided into four groups that underwent different types of operations. In some, the researchers added visceral or subcutaneous fat to the abdomen. In others, they tucked visceral fat or subcutaneous fat under the animals’ flanks, the rough equivalent to the hips. Thirteen other animals formed a control group; they were operated on but didn’t receive extra fat.

Kahn’s team found some surprising benefits to subcutaneous fat. Mice with subcutaneous fat transplanted into their abdomen gained only about 60% of the weight packed on by the control group, which, like most mice, continued to expand. These transplant recipients also had better glucose and insulin levels. The mice that got extra subcutaneous fat in subcutaneous areas also fared better than controls, although not as well as the first group.

More here.

Our own Asad Raza writing for Tennis:

This week TENNIS.com will be featuring one of our blog regulars, Asad Raza, who is in Rome for the men’s Italian Open. He’ll be writing here a couple times, on the home page, and over at Pete’s as well—he’s got this thing covered. Here’s his first post.

Hi Steve,

As you know, today is first day of the Internazionali BNL d’Italia, also known as the ATP Masters Roma, the Internazionali del Foro Italico, the Italian Open, and simply as Rome, which is what I like to call it. I touched down a couple hours ago, promptly discovering that Richard Gasquet’s horrow show of a season continues. But you gotta feel great for Luis “Mucho Lucho” Horna, an undersized warrior who always leaves it all out on the court, win or lose. [Insert mandatory reference to Roman gladiators here.] Homeboy Andreas Seppi took out another Frenchman, Fabrice Santoro, but the Roman papers are touting the chances of Simone Bolelli, for some reason (he’s photogenic?).

It strikes me that Rome is currently the second most important tennis tournament to take place on the European continent, after Roland Garros. The fall indoor tournaments, Paris-Bercy and Madrid, take place too late in the year to determine much more than the scuffle for the last few spots in the year end Master’s Cup. That prestigious grass-court tourney, Wimbledon, is actually held on an island just off the coast of France. The other two European Masters tournaments, Monte Carlo and Hamburg, mark the beginning and the end of the clay season’s run-up to Roland Garros, but Rome is its beating heart.

More here.

Philip Ball in [email protected]:

When in the late 1960s Soviet scientists mistakenly thought they had found a new, waxy form of pure water called polywater, one scientist suggested that it could ‘seed’ the conversion of all the world’s oceans to gloop — a scenario memorably anticipated in Kurt Vonnegut’s 1963 novel Cat’s Cradle, in which the culprit was instead a new form of ice. Super-viruses leaked from research laboratories are a favourite source of rumour and fear — this was one suggestion for the origin of AIDS. And nanotechnology was accused of hastening doomsday thanks to one commentator’s fanciful vision of grey goo: replicating nanoscale robots that disassemble the world for raw materials from which to make copies of themselves.

In part, the appeal of these stories is simply the frisson of an eschatological tale, the currency of endless disaster movies. But it is also noteworthy that these are human-made apocalypses, triggered by the heedless quest for knowledge about the Universe.

This is the template that became attached to the Faust legend. Initially a folk tale about an itinerant charlatan with roots that stretch back to the Bible, the Faust story was later blended with the myth of Prometheus, who paid a harsh price for daring to challenge the gods because of his thirst for knowledge. Goethe’s Faust embodied this fusion, and Mary Shelley popularized it in Frankenstein, which she explicitly subtitled ‘Or The Modern Prometheus’. Roslynn Haynes, a professor of English literature, has explored how the Faust myth shaped a common view of the scientist as an arrogant seeker of dangerous and powerful knowledge⁷.

Benedict Anderson in the New Left Review:

I visited Surakarta in the spring of 1972, after the Suharto government had discovered that I had entered the country by roundabout methods and had informed me that I would be deported. After some negotiations, I was allowed two weeks to wind up my affairs and say farewell to friends. I took to the road with my Vespa and stopped briefly in Surakarta for a meal in the city’s pleasant amusement park. In those days, young ‘white’ men on Vespas who could also speak Indonesian fluently were a real curiosity, so my table was quickly surrounded by locals. When the topic of the mausoleum came up, I asked my new acquaintances what they thought of it. After an awkward silence, a skinny, intelligent old man replied, in Javanese: ‘It’s like a Chinese tomb.’ Everyone tittered. He had two things in mind: first, that in contrast to Muslim tombs, even those of grandees, which are very simple, Chinese tombs are or were as elaborate and expensive as the socially competitive bereaved could afford. Second, in the post-colony, many Chinese cemeteries had been flattened by bulldozers to make way for ‘high-end’ construction projects by the state and by private realtors, speculators and developers.

During the long noontide of the Suharto dictatorship, from the 1970s to the early 90s, three things happened to the mausoleum. It was gradually filled, almost to bursting, with the remains of Tientje’s para-aristocratic relations, but none of Suharto’s; it was heavily guarded by a unit of the Red Beret paratroopers who had organized the vast massacres of the Left in 1965–66; and it became a tourist attraction, especially for busloads of schoolchildren, so that it was always crowded with village women selling T-shirts, baseball caps, snacks, drinks and plaited bamboo fans. One thing did not happen: even after Tientje joined her relations not long before the Crash of 1997, the mausoleum never became sacred or magically powerful. After I was finally allowed back into the country in 1999, I often went to observe the site. No paratroopers, no busloads of children, only a desperate handful of vendors, a melancholy caretaker and the smell of a decaying building that had already endured a quarter of a century of annual monsoons. It remains to be seen what will happen to the place now that Suharto has finally joined his wife. To paraphrase Walter Abish: how Chinese is it?

Gamal Nkrumah in al-Ahram:

Anna is a personal friend. She is fond of Anwar El-Sadat, and I am more inclined to consider Gamal Abdel-Nasser my hero. Yet, we are in total agreement that Egypt and India share much in common, and we are both captivated by the subcontinent and its plethora of cultures. Boghiguian, one of Egypt’s leading artists, is devoting her next exhibition to the memory of the years when Egypt and India laboured under the yoke of British rule. She is mad as hell when she thinks she has reason to be. She is fascinated by India, and by the greatest of the subcontinent’s artistic luminaries — Rabindranath Tagore, the “Myriad-Minded Man”.

Anna Boghiguian becomes foil to the primped-perfect vacuousness of Cairene life. Forgive me, from now on she is no longer Anna, she is Boghiguian. This is a time of composition.

Nobody can accuse Boghiguian of being too pusillanimous, or so it seems in her lighter moments. Her works are bold and bohemian. Most Egyptians are ambivalent at best about India, not so with Boghiguian. Tagore was the subject of a reality document. A certain amount of speculation surrounds Boghiguian’s work. There are bid rumours and whispers in these paintings. You can see clearly that the walls have ears.

Boghiguian, a Boadicea of the Cairene cultural scene, is not making squillions. Boghiguian’s paintings are the 21st century perspectives presented in 20th century costumes. The inspiration for her exhibition was a visit she paid to the Jorasanko district of north Calcutta where the Tagore family mansion is located, today it is a museum. Any visit to the Thakur Bari, the Tagore House, is an experience of immense ramifications. On canvas, she explored the relationship between Tagore and the celebrated Egyptian poet Ahmed Shawqi, between Egypt and India through the interactions between the two men.

Via Delong, Jeffrey Sachs at Comment is Free:

Today’s financial crisis has its immediate roots in 2001, amid the end of the Internet boom and the shock of the September 11 terrorist attacks. It was at that point that the Fed turned on the monetary spigots to try to combat an economic slowdown. The Fed pumped money into the US economy and slashed its main interest rate – the Federal Funds rate – from 3.5% in August 2001 to a mere 1% by mid-2003. The Fed held this rate too low for too long.

Monetary expansion generally makes it easier to borrow, and lowers the costs of doing so, throughout the economy. It also tends to weaken the currency and increase inflation. All of this began to happen in the US.

What was distinctive this time was that the new borrowing was concentrated in housing. It is generally true that lower interest rates spur home buying, but this time, as is now well known, commercial and investment banks created new financial mechanisms to expand housing credit to borrowers with little creditworthiness. The Fed declined to regulate these dubious practices. Virtually anyone could borrow to buy a house, with little or even no down payment, and with interest charges pushed years into the future.

As the home-lending boom took hold, it became self-reinforcing. Greater home buying pushed up housing prices, which made banks feel that it was safe to lend money to non-creditworthy borrowers. After all, if they defaulted on their loans, the banks would repossess the house at a higher value. Or so the theory went. Of course, it works only as long as housing prices rise. Once they peak and begin to decline, lending conditions tighten, and banks find themselves repossessing houses whose value does not cover the value of the debt. 

Jarrell wasn’t about to start tailoring what he thought was good so as better to suit this fellow, but to read Poetry and the Age is to watch a man trying to talk to him anyway. Jarrell’s intervention—and looking back fifty-odd years, it can only be described as such—was personal and relentless. While other critics affected authority, he embraced subjectivity; while others embraced a vocabulary accessible only to themselves, Jarrell could be lyrically colloquial. In Randall Jarrell and His Age, Stephen Burt describes Jarrell’s distinction as a poet: “He made the process . . . of being personally affected by what one reads, continually manifest in his prose style.” Jarrell’s style is humorous, anecdotal, occasionally mean, full of elaborate metaphors and long, shambolic sentences that employ the comma and semicolon like a man raising his finger to pause the audience as their hands go up with questions. “You can’t put the sea into a bottle,” he writes of Marianne Moore, “unless you leave it open at the end, and sometimes hers is closed at both ends, closed into one of those crystal spheres inside which snowflakes are falling on to a tiny house, the house where the poet lives—or says that she lives.”

This is not just impressionistic reviewing; it is imaginative reviewing, which seeks through a few key (but strangely controversial assumptions—that poetry refers to a world outside itself and that readers live in that world—to draw readers to the work itself.

more from Bookforum here.

And yet one doesn’t have to excuse Nixon’s many sins to wonder whether his mix of ruthlessness, self-interest, and low cunning might have been preferable to some of the alternatives on offer. Perlstein depicts a country on the edge of a civil war—a nation in which columnists openly speculated that America might embrace a de Gaulle–style man on horseback, or find a “President Verwoerd” (the architect of South African apartheid) to install in the Oval Office. It was a political moment when the old order could no longer govern, and the new order wasn’t ready. The kids who screamed for Goldwater and McGovern would grow up to be responsible Reagan­ites and Clinton­ians, but back then they had only idealism, not experience, and Nixonland is an 800-page testament to the dangers of idealism run amok.

In this climate, the voters didn’t choose Nixon over some neoconserva­tive or neoliberal FDR; no such figure was available. They chose Nixon over an exhausted establishment on the one hand—nobody seems more hapless in Nixonland than figures like Hubert Humphrey and Nelson Rockefeller—and the fantasy politics of left and right on the other. They chose Nixon over the abyss.

more from The Atlantic Monthly here.

///
Letter to America
Francisco Alarcón

pardon
the lag
in writing you

we were left
with few
letters

in your home
we were cast
as rugs

sometimes
on walls
though we

were almost
always
on floors

we served
you as
a table

a lamp
a mirror
a toy

if anything
we made
you laugh

in your kitchen
we became
another pan

even now
as a shadow
you use us

you fear us
you yell at us
you hate us

you shoot us
you mourn us
you deny us

and despise
everything
we

continue
being
us

America
understand
once and for all:

we are
the insides
of your body

our faces
reflect
your future

//

WE ARE ALL familiar with the rough geography of the United States – the slash of the Rocky Mountains between two great coastlines, the bulge of Maine, the Florida peninsula, the Great Lakes, set in the heartland.

But what about the country’s psychogeography? You know, the great river of extroversion that flows roughly southeast from greater Chicago to southern Florida? Or the vast lakes of agreeableness and conscientiousness that pool together in the Sun Belt, especially around Atlanta? Or the jagged peaks of neuroticism in Boston and New York?

It’s time to learn.

Psychologists have shown that human personalities can be classified along five key dimensions: agreeableness, conscientiousness, extroversion, neuroticism, and openness to experience. And each of these dimensions has been found to affect key life outcomes from life expectancy and divorce to political ideology, job choices and performance, and innovation and creativity.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

From The Guardian:

Roddy Doyle, Esther Freud, David Hare and Ahdaf Soueif will this week launch the first international literary festival in the occupied Palestinian territories. Seventeen British, American, Indian and Arab authors will visit four West Bank cities for the inaugural Palestinian Festival of Literature, subtitled: “The power of culture and the culture of power.”

Soueif, one of the festival’s organisers, said they had invited “authors who we really liked, and who showed a concern for the world in general”. Others taking part include the Scottish writer Andrew O’Hagan and Pankaj Mishra, who is Indian, as well as the British-Sudanese writer Jamal Mahjoub, and the American-Palestinian poet Suheir Hammad. They will work with Palestinian writers at events in Ramallah, Jerusalem, Jenin and Bethlehem.  Soueif said that the lack of Israelis taking part was not deliberate, but added: “I’m resistant to this idea of always having to twin, that every time you talk about Palestine you have to invite an Israeli, or vice versa. They aren’t twinned.”

More here.

Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:

“Why are humans so smart?” is a question that fascinates scientists. Tadeusz Kawecki, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Fribourg, likes to turn around the question. “If it’s so great to be smart,” Dr. Kawecki asks, “why have most animals remained dumb?” Dr. Kawecki and like-minded scientists are trying to figure out why animals learn and why some have evolved to be better at learning than others. One reason for the difference, their research finds, is that being smart can be bad for an animal’s health.

Learning is remarkably widespread in the animal kingdom. Even the microscopic vinegar worm, Caenorhadits elegans, can learn, despite having just 302 neurons. It feeds on bacteria. But if it eats a disease-causing strain, it can become sick. The worms are not born with an innate aversion to the dangerous bacteria. They need time to learn to tell the difference and avoid becoming sick. Many insects are also good at learning. “People thought insects were little robots doing everything by instinct,” said Reuven Dukas, a biologist at McMaster University.

More here.

Robin Rhode. Still from “Untitled, Harvest”. 2005.

Digital animation.

More here and here.

Jill Filipovic interviews Amanda Marcotte on her new book It’s a Jungle Out There, in AlterNet:

Jill Filipovic: What inspired you to write It’s a Jungle Out There in the first place?

Amanda Marcotte: Well, with the very personal nature of blogs I get a lot of questions on how to fight back against sexism on a personal, day-to-day level. I also live in a red state, albeit in a blue city in a red state, so I felt like I had a unique perspective on how to confront the sexism that’s still out there, since I feel like I get it more often than a lot of other feminists do. I came up with a survival guide, a la The Zombie Survival Guide. I thought that it would just be a fun book for feminists to read and have a laugh at the unending sexism we address on a daily basis.

JF: Is the book aimed at nonfeminists too?

AM: I tried to address the issue of women who don’t call themselves feminists but who are in fact feminists by kind of making fun of the whole debate. If you’re afraid to call yourself a feminist, it’s probably an unfounded fear. So I would hope that women who don’t like sexism but who are still scared to call themselves feminists read this and walk away identifying themselves more accurately. But there are other books that address the issue more thoroughly, so I didn’t want to deal with it too much.