The Greeks worshipped it; the Aztecs were a little more conflicted.

Sam Anderson in New York magazine:

The popular history of a humdrum object—that faddish genre in which the most boring items on your dining-room table (salt, cod, potatoes, bananas, chocolate) are revealed to be secret juggernauts of profound social change—has recently become so popular that it’s probably time for someone to write a popular history of it. If I were forced, I’d diagnose the trend as yet another symptom (like $4 gas or home foreclosures) of our current flavor of late-phase capitalism—a commercialism so far advanced we’ve begun transferring historical glories from our leaders (Napoleon, Churchill, Gandhi) to our products, so that we find ourselves surrounded by greatness in every aisle of Whole Foods. I’d also add, if forced, that the genre’s wild success seems to predict its own obsolescence: The conclusion that everything is integral to the history of everything is perilously close, in the end, to no conclusion at all.

True to form, Iain Gately’s new book, Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol, posits its subject as the lifeblood of the world. Booze has presided over executions and business deals and marriages and births. It inspired the ancient Greeks to invent not only democracy but comedy and tragedy. It helped goad America’s Founding Fathers into revolution.

More here.

Gérard Gavarry’s work is one of contemporary French literature’s best-kept secrets. That this should be so here in the United States is no surprise, granted that his books have not yet found their way into English translation—though Dalkey Archive Press will soon remedy that, with translations of Hop là! un deux trois and Façon d’un roman. The fact that Gavarry is not more broadly known in France is more perplexing, however, for the kind of writing that he has practiced for the last twenty-five years or so is bold, original, and innovative. It is as richly deserving of attention as that of any of Gavarry’s contemporaries, yet it has not appealed to a general readership, nor has it received its share of critical ink. One of the reasons for this may lie in what I feel to be Gavarry’s cardinal virtue: his writerly mobility. Reading through his work, it shortly becomes clear that he is unwilling to tread upon ground that he has already traversed, and that he is committed to producing books that come to us anew, each one deploying different narrative strategies and putting a variety of questions on the table for our consideration. The diversity of theme and approach in his books is most invigorating indeed, but it also makes them hard to categorize according to the conventional taxonomies that many critics (and indeed many general readers) rely upon in order to make their way through contemporary literature.

more from Context here.

In Shakespeare what is apparently a small matter is actually often a big deal made seemingly small only because it is happening at pace. The moment of a decision in Macbeth, of a death in Lear: they are no sooner there than gone, with hardly time for the thing to sink in. Says poor Phebe in As You Like It, at the sight of what she takes to be an angry but beautiful young man: ‘Faster than his tongue/Did make offence his eye did heal it up.’ ‘Faster’: that’s why such things strike with disproportionate emotional violence – they are big matters contained within a small space, more than one thing happening fast at a single instant. The conceptualisation comes along afterwards, like the old nurse reporting to an impatient young Juliet: slow, belated and heavy.

I believe that the conceptual language with which we talk about Shakespeare is not very good, because it is far too much after the event. In fact I also believe that, in general, our thinking about what goes on so invisibly, so microscopically in the mind, is cumbersome and restrictive. The enemy is paraphrase, the loss of original experience within a second-hand normalising language. Whereas Shakespeare at the moment of formulation offers the great creative example of what the human mind can do.

more from Literary Review here.

In a packed lecture hall at Columbia University in 1958 — or so the story goes — the eminent physicist Wolfgang Pauli was presenting a radical new theory. In the audience was Niels Bohr, another eminent physicist, who, at lecture’s end, stood up and announced: “We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.”

“Crazy enough” is no doubt a thought that occurred to Stanford theoretical physicist Leonard Susskind when he came up with his holographic principle — an idea that has recently gained traction in the physics community. The principle, which states that our universe is a three-dimensional projection of information stored in two dimensions at the boundary of space, certainly ranks as crazy. But is it crazy enough?

After reading Susskind’s entertaining new book, “The Black Hole War,” you may decide that, yes, the holographic principle may well be on the good side of crazy. But before he gets to the holographic principle, Susskind gives an explanation, both lucid and enjoyable, of why black holes are so crucial to the future of physics and to any eventual reconciliation of relativity and quantum mechanics.

more from the LA Times here.

Richard Brody’s “Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard” is a story of transformation, a painstaking account of a lifelong artistic journey. Now we know how one of the greatest of all filmmakers — the man who so radically changed cinema in 1959 with his debut feature, “Breathless” — became an intolerable gasbag. That probably wasn’t Brody’s aim in writing this exhaustive, and sometimes exhausting, critical biography. As Brody, a film critic and editor at The New Yorker, makes clear in the preface, he still believes in Godard’s relevance, claiming that the resolutely not-retired filmmaker, who has lived in Rolle, Switzerland, for the past 30 years, continues to work “at an extraordinarily high level of artistic achievement.”

That’s a lovely, optimistic sentiment, but one that much of Godard’s post-1967 output doesn’t deserve: Empty shadowboxes like “First Name: Carmen” (1983) or “Notre Musique” (2004) seem designed to alienate viewers rather than draw them closer, which is what happens when any artist begins to live entirely inside his or her own head. It’s the artists we love best who are most capable of disappointing us, and anyone who has taken pleasure in the boldness of the movies Godard made from 1959 through 1967 — he produced an astonishing 15 full-length features in that period, beginning with “Breathless” and including “Contempt,” “Pierrot le Fou” and “Weekend” — would have to know that pain is part of love. If we didn’t, how carefully could we have been watching his movies in the first place?

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

///
In 2003 was the 50th anniversary of the Watson and Crick paper.

Nature magazine commissioned some articles on the occasion, and asked me to write a poem. I had trouble, wrote 3 poems which seemed to head nowhere. Until I went with a friend on a brief trip to Ticino, wandered on an alp, and saw some wonderful blue butterflies. I immediately thought of Nabokov, and the poem took shape.

The poem also owes something to Inger Christensen’s wonderful “Sommerflugledalen,” translated from the Danish by Susanna Nied as “Butterfly Valley: A Requiem”. Zloczow is the small town in then Poland, now Ukraine (Zolochiv) where I was born and survived the war.

A postscript: Nature didn’t like it. Neither did Science.
–Roald Hoffmann

A post postscript: Nature and Science may not have liked the poem, but I do.
–Jim C.

……………………………………………………………………………………..

Code, Memory
Raold Hoffman

—Alcman, they say, called Mnemosyne big-eyed, since we see the past by our thinking

Walk in, to a Ticino alp’s
wild strawberry midsummer,
see the blues flit, conjure up

a young Russian with a net.
Elsewhere, by lamplight,
one you loved can look

at the old photos and say
“you smile like your father,
he also wore a cap.”

The way lit up in ’53, 
two young men just willing
a model into being. Walk,

toward them, past a monk
tending peas, on to stains,
agar plates and centrifuges,

come, walk by the light
of signals from within, past 
x-shaped diffraction patterns; 

on, past ’53, heady
with the logic of splice
and heal, the profligate

wonder of polymerases,
into denominable bounty,
down this biochemical

rope trick of a molecule,
its rings’ sticky signposts
tied to a backbone (chain,
chain, chain, she sings)
run —  of sugars, unsweet,
and phosphate triads.

There, there’s memory’s lair, 
the inexpungable trail 
of every enzyme that worked,

and those that did but
for a while, every affair
the senses had with a niche,

the genes turned off
as we came out of water,
what worked, what nearly killed –

the insinuating virus, code
immured in coiled softness,
coopted symbiotes. Move,

for here wiggling and collision
gauge shape, down necklaces
of meaning interrupted 

by stutters, the ons, offs,
intent, a tinkerer’s means
to function (that escapes us),

on, to difference, earthy life,
its dendral arms hazarding
berry and you, to the butterfly

that lights on torn up earth
in Srebrenice and Złoczów,
that flies to the far place

love obstinately chose.
An Alp… is to be climbed;
they did, our mid-century

helixeers. But oh, an alp
is also a sweet shoulder
of a mountain, that meadow

reaching for snowline, the place
where men drive cattle, rest,
move higher.  An alp is clover,

a place to feed, and watch
another blue, now the morning
glory’s winding grasp and

climb. The word sings, in alp
and alkaline phosphatase
and DNA, in nuanced refrain;

this side of memory, of a world
that was; and one that will be.

Thanks to 3QD reader Jason Williams

//

This is a whole series of articles, slide-shows, videos, and other material relating to the singularity. This is from the article “Waiting for the Rapture” by Glenn Zorpette in IEEE Spectrum:

Bear that history in mind as you consider the creed of the singularitarians. Many of them fervently believe that in the next several decades we’ll have computers into which you’ll be able to upload your consciousness—the mysterious thing that makes you you. Then, with your consciousness able to go from mechanical body to mechanical body, or virtual paradise to virtual paradise, you’ll never need to face death, illness, bad food, or poor cellphone reception.

Now you know why the singularity has also been called the rapture of the geeks.

The singularity is supposed to begin shortly after engineers build the first computer with greater-than-human intelligence. That achievement will trigger a series of cycles in which superintelligent machines beget even smarter machine progeny, going from generation to generation in weeks or days rather than decades or years. The availability of all that cheap, mass-­produced brilliance will spark explosive economic growth, an unending, hypersonic, tech­no­industrial rampage that by comparison will make the Industrial Revolution look like a bingo game.

At that point, we will have been sucked well beyond the event horizon of the singularity. It might be nice there, on the other side—by definition, you can’t know for sure. Sci-fi writers, though, have served up lots of scenarios in which humankind becomes the prey, rather than the privileged beneficiaries, of synthetic savants.

But the singularity is much more than a sci-fi subgenre. A lot of smart people buy into it in one form or another—there are versions that dispense with the life-everlasting stuff. There are academic gatherings and an annual conference at Stanford. There are best-selling books, audiotapes, and videos. Scheduled for release this summer is a motion picture, The Singularity Is Near, starring the actress Pauley Perrette and a ­gaggle of aging boffins who’ve never acted in a movie.

More here.  And here is the whole report. 

From Lensculture.com:

Each year, in the heat of summer, photography lovers descend on the quaint town of Arles in the South of France for a week-long celebration. Photography is shown everywhere — in old churches and Roman ruins, abandoned factories and hotel lobbies, government buildings and exquisite chateaus… everywhere you go! You can see photos projected at night on impromptu screens hanging in flower gardens, and on the walls of narrow alleyways, and pasted as illegal billboards wherever there’s a flat surface.

The yearly event has become like a vast summer camp for adults, where you can eat and drink well, enjoy boundless art, and catch up with your like-minded friends from all over the world. The main curator for the 2008 event comes from the world of fashion, Christian Lacroix. However the biggest buzz is usually generated around the “discoveries” proposed by a handful of experts  — and this year’s discoveries look particularly promising.

More here.

Liesl Schillinger In The New York Times:

In one of his best-known jokes (anti-joke is closer to it), the unsmiling comedian Steven Wright says, in a monotone: “I woke up one day and everything in the apartment had been stolen and replaced with an exact replica. I said to my roommate, ‘Can you believe this? Everything in the apartment has been stolen and replaced with an exact replica.’ He said, ‘Do I know you?’ ” This existential conundrum — the question of what makes an original different from a copy (and how anyone can prove that he is who he thinks he is once the matter is called into doubt) — is both the springboard and the ensuing spring of “Atmospheric Disturbances,” a brainy, whimsical, emotionally contained first novel by Rivka Galchen, a young M.D. turned M.F.A.

Galchen’s narrator, a fussy 51-year-old psychiatrist named Leo Liebenstein, believes that his beautiful, much-younger Argentine wife, Rema, has been replaced by a “doppelgänger,” a “simulacrum,” an “impostress,” an “ersatz” spouse. “Last December,” Leo explains, “a woman entered my apartment who looked exactly like my wife.” Like his wife, the newcomer has the same “wrinkly boots,” the same Argentine accent with “the halos around the vowels,” the “same baby blue coat with jumbo charcoal buttons, same tucking behind ears of dyed corn silk blond hair. Same bangs cut straight across like on those dolls done up in native costumes that live their whole lives in plastic cases held up by a metal wire around the waist.” The idea that this cockatiel of a woman could not be the Rema in question is absurd, but the evidence of Leo’s eyes and ears doesn’t persuade him. “Same everything, but it wasn’t Rema,” he maintains. “It was just a feeling, that’s how I knew.”

More here.

Sara Dickerman in Slate:

I had two major breakthroughs in my own knife-skills training. First, I learned to seek stability in whatever object I was cutting, usually by slicing a thin piece off the bottom of the carrot or zucchini or lemon in question, in order to keep it from rolling. It’s simple, but it made my gleaming chef’s knife seem a lot less dangerous. Secondly, I learned to work systematically left to right—keeping a pile of uncut items on the one side of my knife, and the chopped items on the other—so that I didn’t waste time shuffling the ingredients around the board. That kind of organization keeps you moving along at a fast clip.

Somehow, Andrew hasn’t sought out such pearls of wisdom from me, but the release of Norman Weinstein’s new book-plus-DVD, Mastering Knife Skills, got me wondering whether it would be possible to get Andrew dicing the occasional onion and cutting bagels in a way that doesn’t threaten his brachial artery. Weinstein is a longtime chef instructor at the Institute of Culinary Education in New York, and Mastering Knife Skills is copiously illustrated with photo close-ups demonstrating grips and knife positions. In the accompanying video, Weinstein is pleasantly fluid and matter-of-fact. He mostly focuses on the basic cuts that are useful to home cooks: dicing vegetables, segmenting citrus fruit, breaking down chickens, filleting fish, and other essential maneuvers (although for some reason he spends a few pages explaining how to make hotel-style garnishes like lemon baskets and tomato roses). Could Weinstein provide a knife-skills makeover for Andrew? Lured by the promise of an appearance in Slate, my hammy spouse volunteered.

In the New Left Review:

Dear Monsieur Horkheimer,

It is over a year since I sent you my last résumé of French literature. Unfortunately it is not in literary novelties that the past season has proved most fertile. The noxious seed that has sprouted here obscures the blossoming plant of belles-lettres with a sinister foliage. But I shall attempt in any case to make you a florilegium of it. And since the presentation that I offered you before did not displease, I would like to apologize in advance for the ways in which the form of the following remarks may differ.

I shall start with Paris by Charles Ferdinand Ramuz—the last portrait of the city to appear before the War.nlr]’, FGCOLOR, ‘#E3E3E3’, BGCOLOR, ‘#000000’)” name=”_ednref1″ href=”http://newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2721#_edn1″> [1] This is far from being a success. But the reader will find here certain interesting features, in that they reveal the distance that the portraitist takes from his subject: the city. A distance on three counts. Firstly, Ramuz has hitherto concentrated on tales of peasant life (of which Derborence is the most memorable). In addition he is not French but Vaudois, so not just rural but foreign. Finally, his book was written when the threat of war had begun to loom over the city, seeming to lend it a sort of fragility that would prompt a retreat on the part of the portraitist. The book came to prominence through its serialization in the Nouvelle Revue Française. The author still holds the stage, as he seems to be becoming the nrf’s accredited chronicler of the War. The March issue opens with his ‘Pages from a Neutral’, presented as the start of a long series of reflections.

Lincoln Wolfenstein reviews Helen Quinn and Yossi Nir’s The Mystery of the Missing Antimatter:

Each charged elementary particle has a counterpart with the opposite charge, which is known as an antiparticle. The antiparticle partner of the negative electron, for example, is the positive positron, which was predicted by Paul Dirac in 1930 and discovered by Carl Anderson in 1932; while for the proton it is the antiproton, which was discovered by Emilio Segrè and Owen Chamberlain in 1955. Just like normal particles, antiparticles can combine, forming atoms of “antimatter”. Dirac’s theory suggested that the laws of physics were exactly the same for matter and antimatter; so given this symmetry, why is our visible universe made of matter with no antimatter? This is the question addressed by Helen Quinn and Yossi Nir in The Mystery of the Missing Antimatter.

A surprising experimental discovery in 1964 suggested a possible answer. While experimenting with K-mesons, which belong to the class of “strange” particles that contain a single strange quark, Jim Cronin and Val Fitch at Princeton University found a small asymmetry between particles and antiparticles. Their experiments revealed that there is an interaction that is not the same for quarks and antiquarks — a phenomenon that now goes by the name of CP violation (where C is charge conjugation and P is parity).

This led the Russian theoretical physicist Andrei Sakharov — who later became famous as a campaigner for human rights — to propose that at the beginning of the universe there were equal numbers of particles and antiparticles, but then, at an early stage in the evolution of the universe, some reaction or decay process that involved CP violation led to the destruction of some of the antiparticles.

Samad Khurram in The News:

(Note: Pakistani student Samad Khurram refused to accept an award of academic excellence from United States Ambassador Anne Patterson in Islamabad, Pakistan).

Continuous air strikes on Pakistani territory and repeated intrusions of Pakistani airspace by US-led coalition forces in stark violation of international norms and customs have troubled Pakistanis across the country. These are very similar to US interventions in the political sphere of our country, where elected leaders are constantly bombarded by the Negropontes and Bouchers of this world. A combination of US geopolitical interests in the region and incompetent leaders unable to say “no” to a global superpower, have seriously undermined Pakistan’s physical and political sovereignty.

It is disgraceful for Pakistanis to have their most important decisions being made in Washington and not Islamabad. Pakistanis, for instance, are vehemently opposed to the unconstitutional actions of Nov 3 by Pervez Musharraf and have rejected him and his King’s Party in the Feb 18 election. A recent poll by the International Republican Institute suggested that 81 percent of Pakistanis want Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry reinstated. Already the compromised political process is unable to function properly and the elected leaders are still unable to fulfil their pre-election promises. When the US constantly praises Musharraf, issues statements calling him a constitutional president, or when the Bouchers and Negropontes try and influence every political decision in this country, it becomes obvious to people just who is pulling the strings in their homeland.

Direct US actions have led to the deaths of many innocent Pakistanis, of the country’s constitution, of rule of law and of the political process in Pakistan.

A few days before an academic excellence award was to be awarded to me by Roots School International, about 30 Pakistanis, including 14 soldiers, were killed by US-led coalition air strikes in Mohmand Agency. Had this “accident” been committed by Pakistani forces we would have been eternally damned. The government remained muted, hardly any appropriate level of protest was lodged.

I had no objections to an award from my high school whose administration and teachers I have the utmost regard for – or at least had until the Americans’ actions of June 18. However, the presence as chief guest of the American ambassador (who is basically the Bush administration’s representative in Pakistan) presented a rare opportunity to me for making known my concerns as a patriotic Pakistani. It was in the US, more specifically at Harvard, where I had learned to voice my dissent peacefully and non-violently, to stand up for what I believed in and to speak for those who could not have their voices heard, and I thought of putting some of these very values to good use.

After thinking of all the possibilities and consequences, I decided to attend to the ceremony and refuse the award politely in order to record my protest and make it known to the world that Pakistanis will not let their sovereignty be compromised. Osman Bhai, my ever trusted mentor and oracle, helped with his priceless advice and we worked out a 20-second speech. Any shorter might not have made an impact and a longer one may have resulted in security removing me from the hall.

And so I did just that.

After delivering the short speech–“I am refusing this award in protest of repeated US air strikes resulting in the deaths of many innocent Pakistanis and US tacit support for an unconstitutional president, who has destroyed Pakistan’s judiciary; my conscience will not forgive me for accepting this award”–I walked back to my seat, relieved that I had used my right to dissent, as guaranteed to me under the Constitution of Pakistan.

Due credit must also be given to Ms Patterson, who acknowledged my protest immediately and informed the audience how proud she was of students like myself. Her calm and political maturity at the day was admirable.

The same could not be said about the school administration. Many of their actions on that day were despicable and unfitting of those who educate the future of Pakistan. The administration of Roots should be thankful to my parents who have prevented me from disclosing what my brother and I had to go through–else the many articles on this protest would have also condemned many of their actions. Instead of being proud of a patriotic student from their school who spoke for the dignity of human life, rule of law and democracy, the school administration dared me to leave Harvard if I were so anti-American.

More here.

Maura Pilotti in Metapsychology:

In The Uncertain Sciences, Bruce Mazlish presents a cunning and visionary examination of the scientific enterprise of understanding the human species and, by doing so, of its ability to address real life problems.  He argues that disciplines that traditionally fall under the nebulous umbrella of Behavioral Sciences, such as Psychology, Anthropology and Sociology, and disciplines that are covered by the even more elusive umbrella of the Humanities, such as History and Philosophy, share a common interest, albeit with a different investigative focus. Namely, their desire is to understand the human condition and thus provide useful insights regarding its opportunities for amelioration.  As such, they are the building blocks of what Mazlish calls the “Human Sciences”.

The author argues that the shared goal of all these disciplines would be better served if they were to interact more frequently and openly. He goes even further than simply proposing increased communication among the many and diverse disciplines of the “Human Sciences”.  To ensure that these disciplines will transcend their own excessively encapsulated territories, he proposes an institutional change that will force communication and focus them all on their common purpose.  Namely, he proposes the development and implementation of academic departments of the History and Philosophy of the Human Sciences.

More here.

John R. Miller in The New York Times:

From 2002 to 2006, I led the State Department’s efforts to monitor and combat human trafficking. I felt my job was to nurture a 21st-century abolitionist movement with the United States at the lead. At times, my work was disparaged by some embassies and regional bureaus that didn’t want their host countries to be criticized. I didn’t win every battle, but the White House always made it clear that the president supported my work and thought it was important.

Imagine my surprise, then, when the Justice Department started a campaign against a new bill that would strengthen the government’s anti-human trafficking efforts. In a 13-page letter last year, the department blasted almost every provision in the new bill that would reasonably expand American anti-slavery efforts. Should the State Department’s annual report on trafficking, which grades governments on how well they are combating modern slavery, consider whether governments put traffickers in jail? The Justice Department says no. Should the Homeland Security and Health and Human Services Departments streamline their efforts to help foreign trafficking victims get visas and care? No. Should the Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, State and Justice Departments pool their data on human trafficking to help devise strategies to prevent it? Amazingly, no.

More here.

Glyn Vincent in Columbia Magazine:

China’s hosting of the Olympics this coming August was an opportunity for Beijing to present the world with a new, more benign image of China as a modern superpower. Instead, in March, Tibet erupted and protests spread over an area of the Tibetan plateau that encompasses almost one-quarter of China. Troops were sent in, arrests made, reporters expelled, and imprisoned monks ordered to undergo patriotic reeducation. These actions didn’t help China’s attempts to appear tolerant and transparent. A few weeks later, the journey of the Olympic torch across the globe was disrupted by pro-Tibetan and human rights demonstrations. Politicians in the West threatened to boycott the opening of the Olympic ceremonies and urged the Chinese politburo to reopen talks with the Dalai Lama. Beijing has reluctantly agreed to do so, but some experts see the move as cosmetic. The leaders in Beijing continue to put the full blame for the Tibetan turmoil on the Dalai Lama, labeling him a separatist and a terrorist supported by hypocritical Western governments. The Dalai Lama, for his part, has accused China of oppressing the Tibetan people and producing a “cultural genocide” in Tibet. None of the underlying issues has been resolved, and instead, the argument has become a question of national pride.

We spoke to three leading Columbia University experts on Tibet, China, and Buddhism — Andrew James Nathan, Robert Barnett, and Robert Thur­man — and asked them about the root causes of the conflict, the state of Tibetan culture, and the chances of a Chinese-Tibetan rapprochement.

More here.

Tom Nuttall in Prospect:

When Prospect and Foreign Policy drew up our list of the world’s top 100 public intellectuals a few weeks ago, none of us expected a Turkish Sufi cleric, barely known in the west, to sweep to victory. Nor did we expect every name in the top ten would be from a Muslim background. (Noam Chomsky, who won the last poll in 2005, led the west in 11th place this time.)

The early running this year was made by Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian novelist, and Garry Kasparov, the chess grandmaster turned anti-Putin dissident. At one point Al Gore was on course to add the top intellectual gong to his Nobel peace prize and Oscar. But then, about a week into the process, Fethullah Gülen rocketed to the top of the list overnight—and stayed there. Something had clearly happened: votes were pouring in for Gülen at a staggering rate, and continued to do so for the duration of the poll. Initially we were convinced that a tech-savvy member of the Fethullahçi—the collective noun for Gülen’s millions of worldwide followers—had hacked into the system and set about auto-voting for his hero. We would identify the culprit, discount his votes, normal business would be resumed and Chomsky would grind his way to another victory.

The truth turned out to be more interesting.

More here.  Full list here.

Yes, we did create one.  Regular readers, I thought, may want a slightly fuller picture of the 3qd community.  You can find it also by typing “3 Quarks Daily” into the facebook search window.

From an online collection of some of Kharms’ short stories.

1. Pushkin was a poet and was always writing something. Once Zhukovsky caught him at his writing and exclaimed loudly: – You’re not half a scribbler!

From then on Pushkin was very fond of Zhukovsky and started to call him simply Zhukov out of friendship.

2. As we know, Pushkin’s beard never grew. Pushkin was very distressed about this and he always envied Zakharin who, on the contrary, grew a perfectly respectable beard. ‘His grows, but mine doesn’t’ – Pushkin would often say, pointing at Zakharin with his fingernails. And every time he was right.

3. Once Petrushevsky broke his watch and sent for Pushkin. Pushkin arrived, had a look at Petrushevsky’s watch and put it back on the chair. ‘What do you say then, Pushkin old mate?’ – asked Petrushevsky. ‘It’s a stop-watch’ – said Pushkin.

4. When Pushkin broke his legs, he started to go about on wheels. His friends used to enjoy teasing Pushkin and grabbing him by his wheels. Pushkin took this very badly and wrote abusive verses about his friends. He called these verses ‘epigrams’.

5. The summer of 1829 Pushkin spent in the country. He used to get up early in the morning, drink a jug of fresh milk and run to the river to bathe. Having bathed in the river, Pushkin would lie down on the grass and sleep until dinner. After dinner Pushkin would sleep in a hammock. If he saw any stinking peasants, Pushkin would nod at them and squeeze his nose with his fingers. And the stinking peasants would scratch their caps and say: ‘It don’t matter’.

6. Pushkin liked to throw stones. If he saw stones, then he would start throwing them. Sometimes he would fly into such a temper that he would stand there, red in the face, waving his arms and throwing stones. It really was rather awful!

7. Pushkin had four sons and they were all idiots. One of them couldn’t even sit on his chair and kept falling off. Pushkin himself was not very good at sitting on his chair either, to speak of it. It used to be quite hilarious: They would be sitting at the table; at one end Pushkin would keep falling off his chair, and at the other end – his son. One wouldn’t know where to look.

In the NYRB, Stephen Greenblatt on Rupert Goold’s Macbeth (which was brilliant) and Adrian Noble’s version of Verdi’s Macbeth:

[T]he Stalinist setting does something more than provide an instance of modern tyranny; it closes off the vistas of hope that might otherwise have been glimpsed in such characters as Banquo, Malcolm, and Macduff. Some monsters are manifestly worse than others, but none of the dour-faced men on the reviewing platform should inspire any trust—and the fact that the principal monster happened to want to destroy this or that person and slaughter his family does not in itself confer any moral authority on the victim.

Spread now over the entire social world of the play, we encounter the flattening that we have already remarked in the characters of Macbeth and his Lady. No doubt the lives of Sergey Kirov or Lev Kamenev, Politburo members killed by Stalin in the 1930s, had their edifying moments, but one would be a fool to dream that if only one of them, rather than the Great Father of His People, had been at the helm of the USSR it would all have been so wonderful. The setting has the effect of diminishing any serious interest one might have had in Banquo’s scruples—

         Merciful powers,
Restrain in me the cursèd thoughts that nature
Gives way to in repose,

or Malcolm’s self-doubts: “The king-becoming graces,…I have no relish of them.” More tellingly, it drains away the significance of the spiritual torment that Shakespeare goes out of his way to depict in Macbeth at the play’s opening. Patrick Stewart is a viscerally powerful actor with a huge stage presence, but Goold’s conception of the play gives him almost no room to convey convincingly Macbeth’s metaphysical horror, his fear that Duncan’s virtues

Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against
The deep damnation of his taking-off,
And pity, like a naked new-born babe,
Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubin, horsed
Upon the sightless couriers of the air,
Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye
That tears shall drown the wind.