Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

The latest public discussion about the fate of literary criticism features The Literary Darwinists. With articles appearing in The Boston Globe, The Chronicle, The Nation and elsewhere, there’s a certain buzz. Literary Darwinists are reacting to the rather pitiful — and undisputed — state in which literary criticism finds itself. Particularly within the academy, literary studies is floundering as a discipline without a clear sense of how to move forward. A good deal of what’s written is such convoluted nonsense that reading it amounts to self punishment. The critic William Deresiewicz recently wrote an article in which he concluded: “The real story of academic literary criticism today is that the profession is, however slowly, dying.”

Enter the Literary Darwinists, ready to get serious. People who call themselves Darwinists can always, if nothing else, be counted on for their seriousness. They’ve whipped out the scientific method (always intimidating to your everyday literary types) and begun hammering away on the relationship between biology and literature. One-upping the New Critics, who wanted a rigorous method without all the icky scientific procedures and techniques, the Darwinists promise to clean up the nonsense and give us some verifiable facts about what literature does and how it operates. Not such a bad proposition on the face of it. A big part of literature is constituted by people talking about literature, and one of the more enjoyable things on this planet, in my humble opinion, is that ongoing conversation. For that reason alone, the Literary Darwinists are welcome to the party.

More here.

Benjamin Phelan in Seed:

John Hawks started out as a “fossil guy” studying under Milford Wolpoff, a paleoanthropologist who is the leading proponent of the faintly heretical multiregional theory of human evolution. Coming to genetics from such a background has perhaps given Hawks the stomach to wield unfashionable hypotheses. In December of last year, he, Harpending, and others published a paper whose central finding, that evolution in humans is observable and accelerating, would have been nonsensical to many geneticists 20 years ago. Up to 10 percent of the human genome appears to be evolving at the maximum rate, more quickly than ever before in human history.

“Seven percent is a minimum,” Hawks says. “It’s an amazing number,” and one that is difficult to square with the prevailing view of natural selection’s power. Because most mutations have a neutral effect on their carriers, making them neither fitter nor less fit, neither more fertile nor sterile, only slightly different, those changes are invisible to natural selection. They spread or don’t spread through a population by chance, in a process called genetic drift, which is often thought of as the agent of more change than natural selection. But the changes that Hawks detected, if he is correct, are too consistent from person to person, from nationality to nationality, to have been caused by genetic drift alone.

By looking at the data from HapMap, a massive survey of the genetic differences between selected populations from around the world, Hawks identified gene variants, or alleles, that were present in many people’s DNA, but not in everyone’s. These alleles seemed to be moving, over time, through populations in a way that matched mathematical predictions of what natural selection should look like on the genomic level. And though Hawks doesn’t know why possession of the new alleles should be advantageous, he doesn’t need to know. The signature that natural selection inscribes on the genome is legible even when the import of the message is unclear.

Jagdish Bhagwati, John Gray, Garry Kasparov, Qinglian He, Michael Walzer, Michael Novak, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Kay S. Hymowitz, Tyler Cowen, Robert B. Reich, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, John C. Bogle, and Rick Santorum offer answers over at the Templeton Foundation. Robert B. Reich on why we don’t want to know the answer:

Most of us are consumers who try to get the best possible deals in the market. Most of us are also moral beings who try to do the right things in our communities and societies. Unfortunately, our market desires often conflict with our moral commitments. So how do we cope with this conflict? All too often, we avoid it. We would rather the decisions we make as consumers not reflect upon our moral characters. That way we don’t have to make uncomfortable choices between the products and services we want and the ideals to which we aspire.

For example, when the products we want can be made most cheaply overseas, the best deals we can get in the marketplace may come at the expense of our own neighbors’ jobs and wages. Great deals also frequently come at the expense of our Main Streets – the hubs of our communities – because we can get lower prices at big-box retailers on the outskirts of town. As moral actors, we care about the well-being of our neighbors and our communities. But as consumers we eagerly seek deals that may undermine the living standards of our neighbors and the neighborliness of our communities. How do we cope with this conflict? Usually by ignoring it.

Similarly, as moral beings we want to think of ourselves as stewards of the environment, intent on protecting future generations. But as consumers, we often disregard this moral aspiration. Many of us continue to buy cars that spew carbon into the air, and some of us spend lots of time flying from one location to another in jet airplanes that have an even greater carbon footprint. And we often buy low-priced items from poor nations in which environmental standards are lax and factories spill toxic chemicals into water supplies or pollutants into the air. How do we square our moral stand on the environment with our purchasing habits? Beyond buying the occasional “eco-friendly” product, we typically don’t even try.

Our market transactions have all sorts of moral consequences we’d rather not know about.

In Cairo, Tunis and elsewhere along the rim of the Mediterranean, the first headway made by Islamists in the student world occurred initially in technical institutes, then in engineering faculties and finally in scientific universities—in other words in the most modernist sectors and those most exposed to the outside world.

But did our sociologists not tell us that all things religious emanated from the soil, from history and from tradition? Had our historians and philosophers not proclaimed a century ago that technological and scientific progress, industrialization and communications would without doubt erase nationalistic and religious superstitions? Don’t we daily speak about the “opposites” inherited from the 19th century: the sacred vs. the profane, the irrational vs. the rational, archaism vs. modernity, nationalism vs. globalism?

Apparently, we got everything wrong. Our modernist vision of modernity has itself turned out to be only an archaism of the industrial age.

more from NPQ here.

Michael Pollan in the NYT Magazine:

It may surprise you to learn that among the issues that will occupy much of your time in the coming years is one you barely mentioned during the campaign: food. Food policy is not something American presidents have had to give much thought to, at least since the Nixon administration — the last time high food prices presented a serious political peril. Since then, federal policies to promote maximum production of the commodity crops (corn, soybeans, wheat and rice) from which most of our supermarket foods are derived have succeeded impressively in keeping prices low and food more or less off the national political agenda. But with a suddenness that has taken us all by surprise, the era of cheap and abundant food appears to be drawing to a close. What this means is that you, like so many other leaders through history, will find yourself confronting the fact — so easy to overlook these past few years — that the health of a nation’s food system is a critical issue of national security. Food is about to demand your attention.

Complicating matters is the fact that the price and abundance of food are not the only problems we face; if they were, you could simply follow Nixon’s example, appoint a latter-day Earl Butz as your secretary of agriculture and instruct him or her to do whatever it takes to boost production. But there are reasons to think that the old approach won’t work this time around; for one thing, it depends on cheap energy that we can no longer count on. For another, expanding production of industrial agriculture today would require you to sacrifice important values on which you did campaign.

The philosophy of space-time physics is currently in high gear, with outstanding and long-awaited books recently published by Harvey Brown (Physical Relativity) and Robert DiSalle, and others forthcoming soon from Nick Huggett and Oliver Pooley. All of these authors approach their work primarily as philosophers, yet each incorporates historical exegesis quite essentially in the course of making his philosophical case (each, I should add, in a different style and with different aims). This review is about DiSalle’s Understanding Space-Time (US), but due to their overlapping topics and temporal proximity, some comparisons with Brown’s book will be made in passing. (See Brad Skow’s NDPR review of Brown, http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=6603.) Despite the topical overlap, US and Physical Relativity are very different works — different, but largely complementary.

DiSalle’s goals are very ambitious, and in broad terms they are threefold. He wants to (1) direct philosophers away from the canonical absolute/relational disputes, (2) reshape our understanding of the motivations, arguments, and achievements of the two giants of space-time physics (Newton and Einstein), and (3) refute, in passing, the Kuhnian view that the main paradigm changes in space-time physics are essentially arational and impossible to justify via non-circular arguments.

more from Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews here.

Daniele Castellani Perelli has a brief interview with Tahar Ben Jelloun in Reset DOC:

“We are all foreigners, and not only when we travel beyond national borders. Even a Sicilian in Milan is a foreigner. There is no such thing as an absolute foreigner” said Ben Jelloun, who has lived in Paris since 1971 and also writes for Le Monde and La Repubblica. “The concept of ‘being a foreigner’ moves with us”. In a recent interview, the author of Partir praised diversity (“There are over six billion of us in the world, and no two people are identical. This diversity is humankind’s wealth, it would be dreadful if we were all the same”), but with great intellectual honesty he also emphasised how hard it is not to be racists. “One cannot love everyone, but one can respect everyone without considering wealth or physical features”, he said, acknowledging how hard we all try at times not to generalise, “not to surrender to our lowest instincts”, and “not be racists”.

He admitted in fact that “morals and culture are not enough to avoid being racists; willpower is necessary too”. Cooperation from immigrants is however needed to avoid racism. “What would I say to my compatriots from Morocco who come to live in France? Respect the law, always remain within legality. When one is invited to someone’s home, one does not start by breaking all the plates. Pedagogic work is also needed to achieve integration. One must talk to immigrants and not just insult them.” On this subject, Ben Jelloun criticised the Berlusconi government’s immigration policies, and addressed words that were not at all evident but rather awkward ones on human rights issues.

Maya Jaggi in Bookforum:

The Indian Ocean, with its ancient patterns of trade and empire, has buoyed Amitav Ghosh’s writing for twenty years. The Shadow Lines (1988), his second novel, examines the partition of Bengal, while his anthropological travelogue In an Antique Land (1992) probes age-old ties between India and Egypt. The best-selling novel The Glass Palace (2000) is set between Burma and India circa the Second World War, and The Hungry Tide (2004) explores the mangrove forests and marginal peoples of the Sundarbans tidal plain. His sixth novel, the first in a projected trilogy, traces the global effects of a gargantuan drug-trafficking enterprise. While the slave trade in the Atlantic triangle between England, Africa, and the Americas has long been a rich source of epic fiction, Sea of Poppies casts light on a less well-charted triangular trade.

From the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth, British India led the world as an opium supplier, an export business imposed and monopolized by the East India Company expressly to balance the colonial power’s trade with China. Though Britons thirsted for tea, silk, and porcelain, China’s relative imperviousness to British manufactured goods meant that, without the addictive lure of opium, that demand would have drained the empire’s coffers. The novel unfolds on the eve of the Anglo-Chinese opium wars of 183943 and 1846–60, just as China’s mandarins are cracking down on the illegal import—having failed, as one bellicose British merchant sees it, to “understand the benefits of Free Trade.” As traffickers in Macao are publicly beheaded, and Lord Palmerston threatens to send a fleet to reopen Chinese markets by force, the price of opium plummets, sending a jolt up the supply chain, from British seamen to factory hands and poppy farmers in Bengal and Bihar.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini was said to have been only 8 when he carved a stone head that “was the marvel of everyone” who saw it, according to a contemporary biographer. He was not much older when he dazzled Pope Paul V, who reportedly declared, “We hope that this youth will become the Michelangelo of his century.” Prophetic words: over a long lifetime, Bernini undertook commissions for eight popes, transforming the look of 17th-century Rome as Michelangelo had helped shape Florence and Rome a century before. Much of the Baroque grandeur of the Eternal City—its churches, fountains, piazzas and monuments—can be credited to Bernini and his followers.

Yet, despite his artistic stature, Bernini is only now receiving his first major American exhibition—at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles (through October 26) and then at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa (November 28, 2008-March 8, 2009). One explanation for the oversight is obvious, says Catherine Hess, associate curator of sculpture and decorative arts at the Getty and a co-curator of the exhibition. “How do you move Piazza San Pietro?”

more from The Smithsonian here.

///
Look Not to Memories
Angela de Hoyos

wear your colors
like a present person
……………today is
……………here & now

let the innocent past
lie
in dignity:
……………broken wing
……………wilted lily
……………shroud

don’t look back
the goodbook
advises
……………lest you become
……………a pillar of salt

. . . and I’m a fool
for not discarding
……………my worn-out
……………bags of guilt
///

Michael Dirda in The Washington Post:

The Energies, Gists, and Spirits of Letters, Words, and Combinations Thereof; Their Roots, Bones, Innards, Piths, Pips, and Secret Parts, Tinctures, Tonics, and Essences; With Examples of Their Usage Foul and Savory

Take a look at Alphabet Juice. To all appearances, it might be just one more tributary to the never-ending stream of books about language and proper usage. Haven’t we already had our loosey-goosey grammar and diction excoriated by H.W. Fowler ( Modern English Usage), Theodore Bernstein ( The Careful Writer) and John Simon ( Paradigms Lost)? Haven’t scholars from W.W. Skeat and Eric Partridge to the latest editors of the Oxford English Dictionary unriddled the etymological mysteries behind our most common words? What makes this book by Roy Blount so special?

Well, Blount, of course. You don’t so much read Alphabet Juice as listen to it. The book may be printed, paginated and bound, but I’m guessing that some kind of microchip, probably embedded in the spine, funnels Blount’s ingratiating, slightly disingenuous voice directly into your brain. A given entry — “the f-word,” “subjunctive,” “menu-ese,” “pizzazz” — may start off with a scholarly account of a word or term’s origin, with more than a casual glance at its Proto-Indo-European root, but before long Blount will soft-shoe his way into an anecdote, some comic verse, a bit of wordplay. Look up the phrase “honest broker.” Here we learn that “the word broker stems from the Spanish alboroque, a ceremonial gift at the resolution of a business deal, which in turn is from the Arabic baraka, divine blessing. Barack Obama’s first name comes (by way of his father, same name) from that word.” All fascinating no doubt, but the true Blount wallop — from out of left field — comes in the next paragraph:

“I am told that today a Wall Streeter no longer uses broker as the verb form, but instead endeavors to broke a security. One reason I’m not rich is that I am broker-phobic. I assume they are always trying to unload dreck on people like me and lining up something underhandedly predetermined for insiders: if it ain’t fixed, don’t broke it.”

More here.

From Scientific American:

In the past few years I have heard more people than ever before puzzling over the 24/7 coverage of people such as Paris Hilton who are “celebrities” for no apparent reason other than we know who they are. And yet we can’t look away. The press about these individuals’ lives continues because people are obviously tuning in. Although many social critics have bemoaned this explosion of popular culture as if it reflects some kind of collective character flaw, it is in fact nothing more than the inevitable outcome of the collision between 21st-century media and Stone Age minds. When you cut away its many layers, our fixation on popular culture reflects an intense interest in the doings of other people; this preoccupation with the lives of others is a by-product of the psychology that evolved in prehistoric times to make our ancestors socially successful. Thus, it appears that we are hardwired to be fascinated by gossip.

Only in the past decade or so have psychologists turned their attention toward the study of gossip, partially because it is difficult to define exactly what gossip is. Most researchers agree that the practice involves talk about people who are not present and that this talk is relaxed, informal and entertaining. Typically the topic of conversation also concerns information that we can make moral judgments about. Gossip appears to be pretty much the same wherever it takes place; gossip among co-workers is not qualitatively different from that among friends outside of work. Although everyone seems to detest a person who is known as a “gossip” and few people would use that label to describe themselves, it is an exceedingly unusual individual who can walk away from a juicy story about one of his or her acquaintances, and all of us have firsthand experience with the difficulty of keeping spectacular news about someone else a secret.

More here.

The election takes uglier turns.  Over at Yahoo news, McCain booed at his own rally:

A sense of grievance spilling into rage has gripped some GOP events this week as McCain supporters see his presidential campaign lag against Obama. Some in the audience are making it personal, against the Democrat. Shouts of “traitor,” “terrorist,” “treason,” “liar,” and even “off with his head” have rung from the crowd at McCain and Sarah Palin rallies, and gone unchallenged by them.

McCain changed his tone Friday when supporters at a town hall pressed him to be rougher on Obama. A voter said, “The people here in Minnesota want to see a real fight.” Another said Obama would lead the U.S. into socialism. Another said he did not want his unborn child raised in a country led by Obama.

“If you want a fight, we will fight,” McCain said. “But we will be respectful. I admire Sen. Obama and his accomplishments.” When people booed, he cut them off.

Krugman in his NYT blog on the turn in the campaign:

What it came down to was that a significant fraction of the American population, backed by a lot of money and political influence, simply does not consider government by liberals (even very moderate liberals) legitimate. Ronald Reagan was supposed to have settled that once and for all.

What happens when Obama is elected? It will be even worse than it was in the Clinton years. For sure there will be crazy accusations, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see some violence.

Mohammed Hanif reviews Tariq Ali’s The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power, in the Guardian:

In the introduction to his third book on Pakistan, Tariq Ali quotes a friend who asked if it wasn’t reckless to start a book about the country when the dice were still in the air. Ali’s reply: he would never have been able to write anything about Pakistan if he had waited for the dice to fall. Ali has had an uncanny record of foreseeing the way things are going. In his 1969 book Pakistan: Military Rule or People’s Power he foretold the imminent break-up of Pakistan, a shocking prediction at the time which came true within two years. In the 80s, Can Pakistan Survive? caused outrage within the Pakistani establishment, but two decades later, on the cover of every current affairs magazine and in every TV talk show, not only is Pakistan being branded the most dangerous place on earth but it has even been suggested that the world’s end is being planned there. The Duel is less concerned with the trajectory of the dice than with why they’ve been in the air for more than 60 years and who threw them.

When I heard the title of the book earlier this year, I thought it had a certain poetic flourish. As American drones started pounding the tribal areas of Pakistan and its ruling elite tried to convince their people that it’s for their own good, it turned out to be devastatingly literal.

In the middle of his exhilarating exploration of science and the imagination, Richard Holmes takes us up with the first balloonists soaring from earth in the 1780s. They had expected to find out about the sky. Instead, what they saw was the earth: “A giant organism, mysteriously patterned and unfolding, like a living creature.” Their new view of fields and roads, rivers and hills spurred the map makers, while their flight also stirred an interest in meteorology and the formation of clouds. Holmes compares his awed balloonists to the astronauts of the 1960s looking back at the “single blue planet” they had left behind. Each jolt in perception makes us see the familiar map of our lives differently and revaluate our place in the universe

The Romantic generation examined here stretches from Joseph Banks voyaging to the South Seas in the 1760s to William Whewell coining the word “scientist” in 1833. The central figures are William Herschel and Humphry Davy, stars of the “second scientific revolution”, as Coleridge called it in a lecture of 1819.

more from The Guardian here.

In a statement on the huge state-sponsored salvage of private bankruptcy that was first proposed last September, a group of Republican lawmakers, employing one of the very rudest words in their party’s thesaurus, described the proposed rescue of the busted finance and discredited credit sectors as “socialistic.” There was a sort of half-truth to what they said. But they would have been very much nearer the mark—and rather more ironic and revealing at their own expense—if they had completed the sentence and described the actual situation as what it is: “socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the rest.”

I have heard arguments about whether it was Milton Friedman or Gore Vidal who first came up with this apt summary of a collusion between the overweening state and certain favored monopolistic concerns, whereby the profits can be privatized and the debts conveniently socialized, but another term for the same system would be “banana republic.”

more from Vanity Fair here.

But, as Capote was himself already beginning to suspect, answered prayers are sometimes those we should be most afraid of. The experience of writing and researching “In Cold Blood,” then waiting years for murderers Perry Smith and Dick Hickock to die before he could publish it, burned something out of him. He died of liver disease in Los Angeles in 1984 (at the home of Joanna Carson, Johnny Carson’s ex-wife), having struggled to write at all in the years since “In Cold Blood.” What he did publish seems arch and strained, or, like the prison interview with Manson associate Bobby Beausoleil or the supposedly nonfiction material in “Handcarved Coffins,” so contrived as to appear made up. Capote descended into alcoholism and drug addiction while giving full rein to his cattiness and snobbery. The beguiling charm of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” (Vintage, numerous editions) was no longer his to command; the craft behind “In Cold Blood” disappeared too, and the rest was a tawdry downhill slope.

“Portraits and Observations — The Essays of Truman Capote” (Modern Library: 528 pp., $17 paper) is easily the most important Capote book since “In Cold Blood,” a posthumous collection that limns the story of a sad yet still glorious career.

more from the LA Times here.

///

Metrics and Ethics
Jürgen Rooste

Part 1

a philosophical question
as eventide falls
lukewarm whisky sloshing
in a smudged glass
an old-fashioned, eight-faceted one
like a vase where the spirit
takes its true form and blooms like
a thorny flower – a flesh-eating plant
hallelujah

metrics and ethics should together make
ethrics
something that deals with the overworldly
something that deals with the rotten core of society
and with a man and his abandoned woman and their love
which was young like a cut willow wand
and seeping still its acrid sap
hallelujah

metrics is life’s pulse its syntax
it is how the platonic cardiogram passionately
writes itself on your wrist and temples as sentences
when you touch another person’s wrists and temples
and every pulse is a copy of that very pulse
and an echo and yet again a unique rhythm
rhythm of the body rhythm of the bodies rhythm of many naked and lustful bodies
rhythm of celestial bodies and a whooshing rollercoaster of solstices

life’s constant pulsing and ticking rhythm beaten out by
carbon atoms
annual rings in tree trunks
broods of foxes between flood waters
the hardened heart of a civil servant that missed his bus
the departure of the shore swallows and the return – always the return
stubble growth repeated to the point of bluntness and a young girl’s
a mere girl’s first menstruation
the coca cola company’s seasonal advertising campaigns
stories in scandal sheets and tabloids of murder and infidelity
and the overall decaying, souring and rotting of everything
which is like an unbroken unstoppable bouncing electro beat
and even in its most hideous forms proclaims life itself

this is the true metrics
hallelujah

ethics is when I can still stay human
even when god’s throne is empty even when I have no
work no home no days off or public holidays
ethics is when a lion attacks a lamb and some infant animal’s mother
tries to save its life against overwhelming odds
rather ethics is a teaching in
where we should draw borders and lines
sometimes doing nothing
not interfering, indifference saving one’s own skin staying silent
may be horribly unethical

ethics is a mere teaching with a platonic aspiration
whose spark in every human being is of course unique
and in that case undeniably right but which nevertheless
has demanded from mankind itself to be made a legacy
in the form of culture and laws like we today have laws
even culture

it is a republic at a watershed
in the waning of former ages and worlds
hallelujah

© Translation: 2007, Eric Dickens
Publisher: Poetry International Festival, Rotterdam, 2007
///

From The City Journal:

Why do so many blacks, especially men, find it so hard to grasp the opportunity that is theirs for the taking? Why are “so many of our black youth squandering their freedom?” Cosby and Poussaint’s answer is that the social structure and culture of poor black neighborhoods distort the psychology of the children who grow up there, often shackling them in “psychological slavery.” The authors zero in on the permanently destructive effects of fractured families and slapdash child rearing—much more slapdash than middle-class parents, with their years spent nurturing, encouraging, and cajoling their children, could easily imagine. “In the neighborhood that most of us grew up in, parenting is not going on,” Cosby told the NAACP. “You have the pile-up of these sweet beautiful things born by nature—raised by no one.”

Certainly their fathers aren’t raising them. That 70 percent illegitimacy rate, troubling in itself, isn’t evenly distributed but is concentrated in poor neighborhoods, where it soars above 85 percent and can approach 100 percent. “A house without a father is a challenge,” Cosby and Poussaint write. “A neighborhood without fathers is a catastrophe.” That’s because mothers “have difficulty showing a son how to be a man,” a truly toxic problem when there are no father figures around to show boys how to channel their natural aggressiveness in constructive ways. Worse still, the authors muse, “We wonder if much of these kids’ rage was born when their fathers abandoned them.”

More here.