There are two ways to talk about the new Letters of Ted Hughes (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $45), edited by Christopher Reid. The first is to approach Hughes’s correspondence as an illuminating aesthetic record, the clearest insight we’re likely to get into the mind of a poet viewed by some critics as one of the major writers of the 20th century. The second way is to discuss, well, “It.” “It,” of course, is what Hughes called “the Fantasia,” the swirling, ­decades-long hoo-ha brought about by his relationship with Sylvia Plath: their brief, difficult marriage; their separation due to Hughes’s affair with Assia Wevill; and Plath’s suicide shortly thereafter. “It” ultimately involved a series of bitter clashes over Plath’s legacy, the occasional illicit removal of the surname “Hughes” from her tombstone (by aggrieved “Bell Jar” fans), a series of disputed biographies, at least one lawsuit, endless critical appraisals, re­appraisals and re-­reappraisals, a lame song by Ryan Adams (“I wish I had a Sylvia Plath,” Adams croons, apparently unaware that they don’t come in six-packs) and the inevitable film featuring Gwyneth Paltrow flopping around with Daniel Craig. “It” is a big deal.

more from the NY Times here.

Instead of the weekly presidential radio address of the past, Barack Obama will be recording a video address each week which will be available on YouTube. This is the first:

///
“Just because your opponent bit the dust doesn’t mean
you won’t wind up on the ropes eating crow and spitting blood.”
………………………………..—Boris Platski, sub-prime boxing guru

Ode to Karl Marx
John Forbes

Old father of the horrible bride whose
wedding cake has finally collapsed, you

spoke the truth that doesn’t set us free—
it’s like a lever made of words no one’s

learnt to operate. So the machine it once
connected to just accelerates & each new

rapdance video’s a perfect image of this,
bodies going faster and faster, still dancing

on the spot. At the moment tho’ this setup
works for me, being paid to sit & write &

smoke, thumbing through Adorno like New Idea
on a cold working day in Ballarat, where

adult unemployment is 22% & all your grand
schemata of intricate cause and effect

work out like this: take a muscle car &
wire its accelerator to the floor, take out

the brakes, the gears the steering wheel
& let it rip.  The dumbest tattooed hoon

—mortal diamond hanging around the mall—
knows what happens next.  It’s fun unless

you’re strapped inside the car.  I’m not,
but the dummies they use for testing are.

///

From The Guardian:

Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate About the Nature of Reality by Manjit Kumar

Manjit Kumar’s book is an exhaustive and brilliant account of decades of emotionally charged discovery and argument, friendship and rivalry spanning two world wars. In what also has to operate as a kind of group biography of Planck, Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Pauli, Dirac et al, the quasi-novelistic character sketches occasionally have a comic quality (“The son of a tax collector, Ludwig Boltzmann was short and stout with an impressive late 19th-century beard”); but the real meat of the book is the explanations of science and philosophical interpretation, which are pitched with an ideal clarity for the general reader. Perhaps most interestingly, although the author is admirably even-handed, it is difficult not to think of Quantum, by the end, as a resounding rehabilitation of Albert Einstein.

You might have thought that Einstein, the most famous scientist who ever lived, was not much in need of rehabilitation. But for a long time, the standard story of his reaction to quantum theory painted him as a grouchy old man, whose great work was long in the past, and who could no longer accept novel ideas. The truth, as Kumar shows, is very different.

For a start, Einstein was himself a pioneer of quantum theory, having suggested in 1913 that light was quantised — in other words, that it was not smoothly continuous, but could only exist in multiples of very small packets, or quanta. At the time, Kumar relates, this was “just too radical for physicists to accept”. Two decades later, the great Danish physicist Niels Bohr and his colleagues, who had taken this idea and run with it, had become too radical for Einstein to accept.

More here.

James Campbell in The New York Times:

A Great Idea At the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of Great Books by Alex Beam.

The humble book has survived many attacks on its integrity over the centuries, whether from tyrannical clerics or fearful governments or the new electronic wizard that promises a peculiarly modern “pleasure of the text” via limitless accessibility. Nevertheless, publishers continue to produce books, while countless numbers of people read them and — a word that crops up frequently in relation to books — love them.

In the middle of the last century, a committee of commercially minded academics came up with its own strategy to undermine the enjoyment of reading. With the backing of the University of Chicago, Robert Maynard Hutchins, Mortimer Adler and a few others whittled the literary, scientific and philosophical canon down to 443 exemplary works. They had them bound in 54 black leatherette volumes, with the overall designation Great Books of the Western World, then hired genial salesmen to knock on suburban doors and make promises of fulfilment through knowledge. In a postwar world in which educational self-improvement seemed within everyone’s reach, the Great Books could be presented as an item of intellectual furniture, rather like their prototype, the Encyclopedia Britannica (which also backed the project). Whereas the Britannica justified its hulking presence in the home as a reference tool, however, the Great Books made a more strident demand — they wanted to be read. Unfortunately, once opened, the volumes were forbidding. Each was a small library in its own right, with slabs of text arranged in monumental double columns. The Great Books of the Western World were what books should not be: an antidote to pleasure.

The great minds behind the Great Books were Hutchins and Adler.

More here.

No doubt you are aware of what are known as “419” scams. Emails that begin with things like “I am the widow of the former President of Nigeria,” and then promise you a fee of millions of dollars for arranging some transaction. [Read here about a woman who lost $400,000 to a Nigerian scammer!] There is also a whole cadre of devoted people who spend inordinate amounts of time and energy scamming the scammers back. This is a particularly hilarious account of one such scheme, where a man named Arthur Dent manages to convince the scammer to copy all of a Harry Potter book out in longhand and send the scanned pages to him. It is particularly gratifying to read the exchange as the scammer becomes more and more desperate.

From 419 Eater [This is the first reply by Arthur Dent to the scammer’s email]:

From: Arthur Dent
To: Barrister Musa Issah
Date: January 23, 2006

Dear Mr. Issah,

Thank you very much for you interesting email, it was kind of you to contact me with your proposition.

Unfortunately I am not in a position to help you at this point in time as my company are conducting a very important 4 year long research project on Advanced Handwriting Recognition and Graphology systems.

Our work is extremely intensive and vitally important for our clients. They have committed over eight million dollars to our project and we are nearing the final stages. After nearly 4 years of research and development we are now only three months away from the conclusion and I am afraid I can allow nothing to interfere with the project until its completion.

We are always looking for paid volunteers to help with our project. If you are aware of anyone who would like to earn money by helping with our project by providing samples of their own handwriting to us then please do read the submission information below. We pay US $100.00 per page of handwriting samples.

Sincerely,

Arthur Dent BSC. HHGTTG. PhD.
Director
Singlesideband Systems

Read the rest here.

From two recent novels, a story emerges about the future for the Anglophone novel. Both are the result of long journeys. Netherland, by Joseph O’Neill, took seven years to write; Remainder, by Tom McCarthy, took seven years to find a mainstream publisher. The two novels are antipodal—indeed one is the strong refusal of the other. The violence of the rejection Remainder represents to a novel like Netherland is, in part, a function of our ailing literary culture. All novels attempt to cut neural routes through the brain, to convince us that down this road the true future of the novel lies. In healthy times, we cut multiple roads, allowing for the possibility of a Jean Genet as surely as a Graham Greene.

These aren’t particularly healthy times. A breed of lyrical Realism has had the freedom of the highway for some time now, with most other exits blocked. For Netherland, our receptive pathways are so solidly established that to read this novel is to feel a powerful, somewhat dispiriting sense of recognition. It seems perfectly done—in a sense that’s the problem. It’s so precisely the image of what we have been taught to value in fiction that it throws that image into a kind of existential crisis, as the photograph gifts a nervous breakdown to the painted portrait.

more from the NYRB here.

Like President Bush, I first crushed out on Gregory when he popped up in the White House pressroom, the unbeatable whack-a-mole of the administration’s nightmares. Bush affectionately called him Stretch, which is the most likable thing he’s done in eight years. Aside from the PDA that spills over from the gay bars in my neighborhood, I’ve never seen a man more in love with another man. Not just regular love, but serious romantic comedy love, the chemistry of opposites that begins as antipathy and blossoms into enduring ardor. I believe Bush felt the same anticipatory excitement as I did whenever Gregory’s lanky folding ruler body would begin to unfurl. Admittedly, I was most likely a bit more turned on by the questions, but I believe we both melted a bit at Gregory’s boyish, Curious George-like face, topped by that mop of gray hair glued down into a style I refer to as “Corporate Temp Warhol.”

I love that Gregory is fun, and I love even more that he’s funny. And not just by reputation, but on record. YouTube is chockablock with Gregory good times. His vaguely stoned phone interview with Don Imus from India; his hilarious appearance on Leno where he does a spot-on Bush impression; and, most famously (and already known all too well by the other Gregory lovers) his very groovy, very public boogie down to Mary J. Blige on the Today show. My favorite nerdy white man totally feeling my favorite strong black woman? Two words: mega-swoon.

more from The Daily Beast here.

In the mainstream Zionist narrative—which includes liberal supporters—the State of Israel is the realization of legitimate Jewish nationalism. That project, having been sanctioned by the international community through both the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine (awarded to Great Britain with the understanding that the British would carry out their commitment described in the famous Balfour Declaration) and the UN partition resolution, was rejected by the Arab world. Because of this violent rejection, Israel has been forced to maintain a strong military and fight many wars as well as remain vigilant against constant terrorist attacks from its enemies. The liberal version here will admit that the settlement enterprise in the West Bank and Gaza was a mistake, and that often the Israeli government acts unwisely and unjustly. But the basic parameters of the narrative remain.

On the Palestinian side (which includes many Jews who fall outside the mainstream Zionist camp), the fundamental theme is that Zionist settlement in Palestine was a colonial enterprise, which flourished behind the guns of a major world power that did not have the right to dispose of this land, and that in order to erect an exclusivist Jewish state, the Zionists, once they achieved sufficient power, threw out most of the indigenous population and treated those that remained as second-class citizens. By and large, the Zionist enterprise is seen as similar to the European colonization of North America and Australia.

These are obviously broad-stroke descriptions, but they will do for now. With regard to these conflicting historical narratives, I have two points to make: first, there is a fact of the matter about their relative accuracy, and second, that it matters.

more from Boston Review here.

///

Kudu
Maxamed Xaashi Dhamac ‘Gaarriye’  

My father told me this story
when I was a child. We sat
in the shade of a tree and he began:

Long ago there lived a king
who sprouted a pair of horns – just buds,
at first, but he checked them every day
and wore his turban low to hide
this blemish, to hide this mark of shame.

But a king, of course, doesn’t wash his own hair!
His man-servant knew all about the king’s shame
and day by day the knowledge grew
inside him, a word that had to be spoken,
a terrible secret that had to be told.

They said, You’re mistaken.
He said, No.

They said, Dead men keep secrets.
He said, Ah…

Read more »

From The Abbeville Manual of Style:

Malcolm Gladwell is one of the world’s best-selling authors and most prominent public intellectuals, having risen to superstardom on the basis of such volumes as The Tipping Point and Blink. He is a skilled and entertaining writer, exemplifying the modern New Yorker “house style” for journalism with its combination of solid research, amused detachment, and quirky anecdotes in the Ken Burns mold. Tragically, Gladwell is also often very wrong. His work, famous for its forays into sociology, social psychology, market research, and other trendy disciplines, is a testament to both the exciting possibilities and the intellectual limitations of those fields. His penchant for what might be called pop statistical analysis sometimes leads to elegant, well-supported, and counterintuitive conclusions, but just as often recalls the man who couldn’t possibly have drowned in that river because its average depth was five feet.

We bring all this up in large part because of an article called “Late Bloomers” that he wrote for last month’s New Yorker.

More here.

Joseph Bottum in The Weekly Standard:

During a brief remission in his wife’s cancer, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist V.S.Naipaul casually explained to a journalist that he had always been “a great prostitute man,” mongering among the whores from the early days of his marriage. The publicity that followed from the remark “consumed” his wife, he later admitted to his biographer, Patrick French. “She had all the relapses and everything after that. She suffered. It could be said that I killed her. .  .  . I feel a little bit that way.” Unfortunately, he didn’t feel “that way” enough to think it inappropriate to move into his house, the day after he cremated his wife, his new mistress, a Pakistani journalist he’d just met (and would, in short order, marry).

Even before the whoring revelations, Naipaul’s first wife, a middle-class woman named Patricia Hale whom he’d met while he was a student on scholarship to England, had known about a prior mistress–but only because Naipaul himself decided one day to tell her, explaining the violent acts he enjoyed with the woman, some of them memorialized in photographs he brought along to aid the explanation. The woman’s name was Margaret Gooding, and Naipaul met her in 1972 in Buenos Aires. French’s new biography of Naipaul, The World Is What It Is, quotes extensively from her letters: unbearable scrawls that read like clinical case studies drawn from the pages of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. She begs, moans, despairs, and pleads for Naipaul’s “cruel sexual desires.” She calls him her “god,” her “black master.” Her multiple abortions of his children sicken her, but she offers them up to him as proof of her love and abasement.

And all this sex stuff is only the beginning.

(Picture: Sir Vidia and Lady Naipaul in 2003. Naipaul married Nadira Khannum Alvi shortly after Pat died).

More here.

Mark Rowlands in The Telegraph:

When Brenin was a young wolf, his favourite game was to steal cushions off the sofa or the armchair. If I was in another room, perhaps working in my study, he would appear at the door, cushion in mouth, and, when he knew I had seen him, he would tear off through the house, through the living-room, the kitchen and then out into the garden, with me in hot pursuit. The game was one of chase and could go on for quite a while. I had already trained him to drop things – so I could have ordered him to drop the cushion at any time. But I didn’t have the heart; and, anyway, the game was much more fun. And so he would charge around the garden, ears back, tail tucked low and eyes shining with excitement, while I thundered around ineffectively behind him. Until he was about three months old, Brenin was quite easy to catch – and so I just pretended he was too quick for me. But the pretence gradually shaded into reality. Soon he was throwing me little shimmies – feinting to go one way while actually going the other. When I caught on to this trick, the shimmies would become double shimmies. Eventually the game was played in a confused blur of feint, double feint and triple feint – feints nested within feints. Of course, this sidestepping practice worked wonders for my rugby skills. I had always based my game on the idea of running over people rather than around them. This worked well in Britain, where I grew up, but not as well in the US, where the people are generally much bigger and have been raised playing American football, where the tackling is ferocious. They are, however, much easier to confuse and, with all this instruction from Brenin, I became a twinkle-toed, sidestepping demon of the south-eastern United States.

More here.

From Burbia:

Sometimes you come upon something so ridiculous, so on-its-face laughably stupid, you just want to stop everything and enjoy. That’s what we did when we first saw this investors-demo video of SpeedFit, a new concept in exercise technology:The Mobile Treadmill…a treadmill designed specially to move/walk down the street while you’re treading.

Because, let’s see, walking down the street without a treadmill is too tough?

The proud creators of SpeedFit are now looking for investors. Seriously — and this vid is their pitch. Sure, if you want to walk or run down the street for exercise, you can…walk or run down the street. But, with SpeedFit, now you can do the exact same thing only on a contraption that costs a ton of money, is a pain in the ass (it’s one heavy mo-fo), is a potential traffic hazard and can only barely turn corners. Kind of like marketing a spanking new heart-lung ventilator-machine to 100% healthy people who are perfectly capable of breathing on their own. Sign us up!

From Nature:

Two teams of astronomers are independently claiming to have the first ever images of planets in orbit around a star other than the Sun — with pictures from one team showing three planet-like bodies orbiting a distant star. Using the Keck and Gemini telescopes in Hawaii, one team took infrared images of three objects, each 5-13 times the mass of Jupiter, in orbit around HR 8799, a star 130 light years from Earth in the constellation Pegasus.

The other team used the Hubble Space Telescope to take photographs of a potential planet that’s no bigger than three Jupiters². It circles Fomalhaut, a star 25 light years away from Earth in the constellation of Piscis Austrinus, completing one orbit every 872 years. The object is roughly 119 times further away from its star than Earth is from the Sun, and is located at the inner edge of a debris disk that it appears to have sculpted into a sharp smooth ring by pulling in stray dust as it orbits. Astronomers have been hunting for direct evidence of planets orbiting a star outside the Solar System for nearly a decade. More than 300 extrasolar planets, or exoplanets, have been discovered so far but these have been found using indirect methods — for example, by detecting the way a star wobbles as planets orbit them rather than using images.

More here.

In the end, Miriam Makeba got her wish: to take leave of this world right after taking her final bow on stage, the only place where she felt truly at home. It was a grandly operatic ending for a woman whose very life defined drama. She endured multiple marriages and divorces, domestic abuse, alcoholism and cancer. Then, too, there were the 11-plus car accidents, the plane crash, the murders of her two uncles in the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960; the death of her only daughter, Bongi; the arrests, the banning of her records, the extended exile from her homeland, South Africa.

She spent six months of the first year of her life in jail, after her mother was arrested for making beer in their home. She was a teenager when apartheid became the law of the land, not that things were much better before. But under apartheid, she wrote, “things went from bad to worse. [Apartheid] would become one of the most hated words the world has ever known.”

more from The Root here.

In Counterpunch:

Sonal Shah released a statement against “baseless and silly reports” on the Internet. She forthrightly pointed out that her “personal politics have nothing in common with the views espoused by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) or any such organization.” The VHP and the RSS are well known to spread hate and to have participated in ghastly acts of violence within India against Muslims, Christians, and oppressed castes, not to speak of spreading the general misogyny that their ideology preaches.
 
Sonal Shah’s statement is gratifying, but unpersuasive. The VHP’s Shyam Tiwari recently said, “Sonal was a member of the VHP of America at the time of the [2001 Kutch, Gujarat] earthquake. Her membership has expired.” This was eight years after the 1993 Gujarat riots, when the VHP had an active, and ghastly role. Ms. Shah was 33 years old then. Her parents were active in Hindutva organizations. How could she not have known of their role, and the controversy surrounding them? She was not from an apolitical household, but an activist one. I brought up her parents only to suggest that she cannot claim now that she was ignorant of the VHP’s role in India. She must have known. And yet she participated in its activities. There were a host of other agencies that raised money for the earthquake survivors. All the earthquake survivors: credible media reports showed that the money raised by the VHP did not go to Muslim survivors, only Hindu ones (for example, “Communalizing Relief: VHP seizes earthquake opportunity,” Statesman, Kolkata, 12 February 2001 and Vijay Dutt, “Discrimination in Distribution of Relief against Dalits in Gujarat Causes Concern,” Hindustan Times, 27 February 2001). This is hardly an act of charity.

The VHP says Ms. Shah left the organization in 2001. Three events from 2004 bear mention:       

(1) Ms. Shah delivered a keynote address at the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh young conference. The HSS is the U. S. branch of the RSS. The University of Chicago’s Martha Nussbaum describes the RSS as “possibly the most successful fascist movement in any contemporary democracy.” The RSS “guru” (teacher) M. S. Golwalkar wrote glowingly about Nazi “race pride,” and called it a “good lesson for us in Hindusthan to learn and profit by.”

(2) Ms. Shah delivered a keynote address at an Ekal Vidyalaya conference in Florida. The Ekal Vidyalaya’s are schools set up in tribal areas. The RSS’s Chief of Service work, Premchand Goel, said that the RSS and the VHP run “thousands of Ekal Vidyalayas.” One Ekal Vidyalaya teacher, Mohan Lal, told Frontline reporter, T. K. Rajalakshmi, “We go for the RSS shakha [branch] meetings regularly. The teachers are selected only if they subscribe to the RSS way of thought.”

‘It’s certainly an excellent arrangement,’ the official says, ‘always unimaginably excellent, even if in other respects hopeless.’ We can easily picture, or even recall, arrangements that are excellent for some and hopeless for others, and that is what the phrase ‘in other respects’ invites us to do. But the larger rhythm and grammar of the sentence ask us to go beyond this option, to think both contrary thoughts at once, taking excellence and hopelessness as partners in an intricate dance, each calling for and implying the other; as if the arrangement is excellent because it’s hopeless, hopeless because it’s excellent. Can we manage this logical feat? And where are we?

We are in a room at the Herrenhof Inn, in Kafka’s novel The Castle. The time is around 5 a.m.; K, the land surveyor hired by the castle authorities, but not as yet entrusted with any land-surveying, has an appointment with an official. His great goal, we have learned by now, is not necessarily to get on with his work but rather to be directly acknowledged by the higher officials of the castle, to experience something other than the many evasions and obstructions he has met with so far.

more from the LRB here.