Looking back to the birth of the modern verse-novel with Byron’s Don Juan and Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, it is plain that ironised lightness of tone and touch is vital to their success, supported by their stanza-forms’ respective demands for triple and unstressed rhyme. In each poem much is narratively noticed, from the terrible to the trivial, and more is implied, some of it searing. Seth in The Golden Gate stuck closely to the Onegin stanza, including unstressed rhymes (as with ‘fellow/yellow’, ‘critic/arthritic’, and ‘poet/know it’), and like Byron and Pushkin maintained a detached, primarily comic tone to encompass tragicomic narrative with ironic observation. Fuller’s The Illusionists and Keating’s Jack, the Lady Killer also use Onegin stanzas and rely on their tone, but innovative choices of stanza-form – Dantean terza rima, blank heroic tercets, or Thompson’s single-rhymed, loosely heroic quatrains – are commoner, and bring a greatly expanded range of tones to match range and difficulties of subject-matter. And whatever it was Seth’s doubting interlocutors so scorned (or feared?) in the revived verse-novel, its modern authors are overwhelmingly poets far from “sad blancmange”, who know very well that the world is hard, and potently chart in their work some of the reasons that they and their countrymen find it so.

more from The Liberal here.

A year and a half ago, the attention paid to crime writers like Greg Rucka, David Morrell, Duane Swierczynski and Denise Mina turning their storytelling attention to the comic book format had me wondering about the opposite tack: What happens when prose-and-picture stars leave artwork behind to concentrate solely on the words? But now, with graphic novels permeating the mainstream with greater force and attendees flocking to comic book conventions in San Diego and New York in six-figure droves, it’s time to reverse course and revisit the pictorial approach to mystery and suspense stories. The timing is especially ripe now that DC Comics has confirmed its dedicated line for graphic crime novels, Vertigo Crime, will finally launch this August, ending the arduous buildup of expectation for Ian Rankin’s maiden voyage into this territory featuring “Hellblazer” main character John Constantine and Brian “100 Bullets” Azzarello’s 1960s noir re-imagining. But we can also look forward to Darwyn Cooke’s adaptation of Richard Stark’s Parker novels into comic books this summer and, down the line, Oni Press’ dedicated imprint of graphic novels curated by Karin Slaughter under the Slaughterhouse name.

more from the LA Times here.

The writers of the Beat Generation had the good fortune to give themselves a name and to write extensively about their lives, in novels like Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” and William Burroughs’s “Junkie,” in poems like Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and, later, in memoirs like Joyce Johnson’s “Minor Characters” and Hettie Jones’s “How I Became Hettie Jones.” Jones once said they couldn’t be a generation because they could all fit in her living room, but in the popular imagination they were much more than the sum of their body parts or writings. They were a brand. When the country still considered literary writers and poets important public figures, these were literary writers and poets who came with luridly colorful lives, full of sex and drugs and cars, “the best minds of my generation,” “the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live,” cultural avatars who were often linked more by lifestyle considerations than by writerly ones. If they inspired lots of bad poetry set to bongos and little poetic discipline, they have even more effectively escaped disciplined literary or historical analysis. They rocked; they posed a threat to the nation’s youth. Either you got them or you didn’t. What could matter compared with that?

more from the NY Times here.

First Sight

W.S. Merwin

There once more the new moon in spring
above the roofs of the village
in the clear sky the cold twilight
under the evening star the thin
shell sinking so lightly it seems
not to be moving and no sound
from the village at this moment
nor from the valley below it
with its still river nor even
from any of the birds and I
have been standing here in this light
seeing this moon and its one star
while the cows went home with their bells
and the sheep were folded and gone
and the elders fell silent one
after another and loved souls
were no longer seen and my hair
turned white and I was looking up
out of a time of late blessings.

From South Asian Life:

“Luck By Chance” is the story of Sona and Vikram, both struggling actors who are looking for a break in the big, bad world of Bollywood. My favourite scenes in Zoya Akhtar’s “Luck By Chance” are when Rishi Kapoor is on screen as the over the top, aging Bollywood producer Romy Rolly. And that’s not just because he is brilliant in the part — he is. But the scenes capture perfectly the subtle performances and nuanced characters this film is bursting with. “Luck By Chance” is the story of Sona and Vikram, both struggling actors who are looking for a break in the big, bad world of Bollywood. Through their story, Akhtar depicts the confounding, ugly and yet oh-so-attractive world of our film industry.

The director tells the story light-heartedly but don’t expect direct humour. There are a lot of subtle references to real-life Bollywood characters, dialogues said in the passing and facial expressions, a refreshing change from the in- your-face slapstick humour we are subjected to most of the time. The film follows both Sona (Konkona Sen Sharma) and Vikram (Farhan Akhtar) through their journey in Bollywood, one they undertake with the understanding that nothing here comes easy. So she sleeps with a producer who promises her a big break and he has no qualms about flirting with a yesteryear actress in the hope she will cast him in her daughter’s debut project. A host of characters as well as some top Bollywood actors make an appearance in this journey. What is commendable is how Akhtar has astutely used even two-minute guest appearances. So you have Aamir displaying his “perfectionist” tendencies, Abhishek mentioning “Pa” and John Abraham talking about doing “experimental films.”

More here. (Note: Zoya and Faran are the children of famous Bollywood lyricist Javed Akhtar.)

From The Telegraph:

The atmosphere at Roberto Benigni's one-man show Tutto Dante (“Everything about Dante”) was more akin to a football match than a night at the theatre. With tutti gli Italiani in the UK, it seemed, assembled at the Theatre Royal, there were whoops and stamping feet before the man himself even bounced on stage, accompanied by circus music and whirling lights. Benigni has long been a national hero in Italy. Climbing over the seats to collect his Oscar for the 1997 tragicomedy La Vita è bella (Life Is Beautiful) was only the most conspicuous of his acts of iconoclasm. Since the 1970s he has been adored as a satirist of Italy's politicians. But, over the past three years, he has added to his hero status through his touring show dedicated to Italy's medieval literary giant, Dante Alighieri, author of The Divine Comedy.

But before Benigni got down to the serious business of the evening, he acted as his own warm-up artist. His jokes about Italy's prime minister Silvio Berlusconi raised easy laughs, but were none the less funny for that – not least because he delivered them in English. The advance publicity had said that the show would be in Italian, with no surtitles (because he improvises), so the shift was greeted with relief from the minority of the Brits – and sighs of disappointment from the Italians. “It will be like Mr Bean in Rome talking about Milton,” said Benigni. But despite his comic delivery, this was a serious enterprise, a homage to a great era of 13th- and 14th-century Italian culture.

More here. (I saw Benigni perform this on stage seven years ago in Chicago and it is a rare treat for Dante lovers. After 90 minutes of an almost comical interpretation of the Thirty-third Canto from The Paradiso, Benigni suddenly stood completely still at center stage and recited the entire 146 lines from memory. Although it was in Italian, there was not a dry eye in the audience. I was so moved by it that I made my 8 year old daughter memorize the entire Canto, in English of course.)

Richard Dawkins in The New Statesman:

Dear Person of Faith

Basically, I write as fundraiser for the wonderful new Tony Blair Foundation, whose aim is “to promote respect and understanding about the world’s major religions and show how faith is a powerful force for good in the modern world”. I would like to touch base with you on six key points from the recent New Statesman piece by Tony (as he likes to be called by everybody, of all faiths – or indeed of none, for that’s how tuned in he is!).

“My faith has always been an important part of my politics”

Yes indeed, although Tony modestly kept shtum about it when he was PM. As he said, to shout his faith from the rooftops might have been interpreted as claiming moral superiority over those with no faith (and therefore no morals, of course). Also, some might have objected to their PM taking advice from voices only he could hear; but hey, reality is so last year compared with private revelation, isn’t it? What else, other than shared faith, could have brought Tony together with his friend and comrade-in-arms, George “Mission Accomplished” Bush, in their life-saving and humanitarian intervention in Iraq?

Admittedly, there are one or two problems remaining to be ironed out there, but all the more reason for people of different faiths – Christian and Muslim, Sunni and Shia – to join together in meaningful dialogue to seek common ground, just as Catholics and Protestants have done, so heart-warmingly, throughout European history. It is these great benefits of faith that the Tony Blair Foundation seeks to promote.

More here.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

Back in the olden days, philosophers thought a lot about water. Thales (sometimes considered the first philosopher) went out on a limb and proclaimed that “all is water.” This was a gutsy move given the fact that a simple walk around the block will convince most human beings that all is, in fact, not water. But Thales was after something more profound. He was trying to make a distinction between the “really real” and the way things seem, the way things appear. Water is the foundation, he was saying, water is what its all about. Such a distinction pretty much defined the act of philosophizing from then on.

The next guy to make a big claim about water was Heraclitus. He mentioned, notoriously, that you can't step into the same river twice. For Heraclitus, all was not water. All was, instead, conflict, tension, movement, dynamism. The reason you can't step into the same river twice is because the damn thing changes as part of its nature, its nature is to become different all the time. This led Plato to quip that if the nature of things is so unstable as that, you can't even step in the same river once.

Ever since those early days of the water wars human beings have been trying to figure out what makes one thing one thing and another thing another thing. In very general terms, there have always been some people who are more comfortable with Being and some people who are more comfortable with Becoming. The Being people get excited about how identity remains stable, how a chair is always a chair, a table always a table. The Becoming people are fascinated by the gray areas, the things you can't quite categorize, the fleeting, the indefinite.

Photography, since its invention in the 19th century, has always played the role of a double agent. On one hand, photography fixes time, a notoriously shifty and ever-changing phenomenon. But photography grabs time and sits it down. You could say that photography freezes moments of essence. This pleases the Being people. A photograph has a sliver of forever inside it.

But photography plays the other side of the field as well. That's because photography is in league with the ephemeral. Photography loves the mundane, the seemingly inconsequential. Especially as the technology got simpler to use, photography became the great art of the passing moment. The snapshot is the friend of the Becoming people.

More, including slideshow, Leave a comment

Jeff Prucher in the Oxford University Press Blog:

In no particular order:

1. Robotics. This is probably the most well-known of these, since Isaac Asimov is famous for (among many other things) his three laws of robotics. Even so, I include it because it is one of the only actual sciences to have been first named in a science fiction story (”Liar!”, 1941). Asimov also named the related occupation (roboticist) and the adjective robotic.

2. Genetic engineering. The other science that received its name from a science fiction story, in this case Jack Williamson’s novel Dragon’s Island, which was coincidentally published in the same year as “Liar!” The occupation of genetic engineer took a few more years to be named, this time by Poul Anderson.

3. Zero-gravity/zero-g. A defining feature of life in outer space (sans artificial gravity, of course). The first known use of “zero-gravity” is from Jack Binder (better known for his work as an artist) in 1938, and actually refers to the gravityless state of the center of the Earth’s core. Arthur C. Clarke gave us “zero-g” in his 1952 novel Islands in the Sky.

More here.

At night I put myself to sleep imagining how I would load a car up with TNT and drive down to the border where the enemy stood leering, waiting for women and children they could disembowel and torture. I would wait for them to stand all in one place, and then I would press down on the gas pedal, hard, and plow right into them. The car would explode and I would die, but I would kill enough of them with me that the war would end. I lay in bed and cried, imagining my parents and brother crying, missing me, but then I imagined them walking in a parade with the rest of the country. Everyone would be there: my aunts, uncles, cousins, and neighbors, my classmates and teachers. And they would all walk hand in hand down to the south, and they would tear out the roadblocks and checkpoints and barbed wire with their bare hands. They would cry with joy, and dance, and feast until the stars wheeled to the other side of the night sky. The long war would be over. And I would watch them from posters, my eyes remote and full of grace, focused on a future I would never know, a future made possible through my sacrifice. In thick calligraphy, it would say my name, and above it, my title: The Hero of Lebanon, the Girl Who Ended the War.

more from Bidoun here.

The story of the last twenty years, of the period since the “change of regime” introducing a genuinely democratic system of government, is a novel one for Hungary. Yet, it is a very old story. God freed the Israelites from bondage in Egypt in order that they should thenceforth have no other God but Him: they must obey the law, so that they should no longer be enslaved to a despot. There was much rejoicing among the people to begin with. But when things did not go as smoothly as they had imagined, they immediately longed to be back with the fleshpots of Egypt and started worshipping the golden calf. That, in a nutshell, is also what has happened to Hungary over the last twenty years. Those who have directly known servitude and oppression, and for whom freedom is the greatest value and gift, have not ceased rejoicing to this day. I myself am of that camp. Regime change, as far as I was concerned, was a miracle that one hoped for but did not expect to see, and a miracle it has remained. What- ever has happened since will not alter that. As János Vajda might have written in “Twenty Years On,” his poem of 1876: whatever the woman he apostrophised may have done over the past twenty years, she was still the woman he had given his love to for ever. All I can hope – to stay with János Vajda – is that we too shall be able to produce an equally fine tale under the title of “Thirty Years On”.

more from Eurozine here.

Stendhal said that the novel was ‘a mirror that one walks down a road’, ‘un miroir qu’on promène le long d’un chemin’. Although this maxim is generally agreed to be a masterful summary of the realist project in fiction, it has always brought out a literal streak in me. How much would the mirror show? Wouldn’t everything depend on how big it was? Who would be looking into it? They wouldn’t have much of a view, would they? Is the novelist the person who’s carrying the mirror, or is she standing by the side of the road looking at the mirror, in which case isn’t that a bit passive, given that it’s presumably meant to be her novel? Would the mirror change angle, so you could see more of what was going on? We can all relax. It’s now clear that Stendhal meant to say the novel is a bit like Google Street View.

more from the LRB here.

The Polish Biographical Dictionary in a Library in Houston
Adam Zagajewski

Prince Roman Sanguszko treks across Siberia
(Joseph Conrad will write a story on him).
Near the end of his long life he founds a library;
he dies universally admired.

Maria Kalergis (see: Muchanow, Maria)
—alleged ties with the Tsar's secret police;
“half her heart is Polish,” the other half—
unknown. Friends with Liszt and Wagner,

Chopin's pupil. Patron of the Warsaw theater,
renegade and patriot by turns.
Poor Norwid fell in love with her (see: Norwid).
And loved her with all his heart.

Julian Klaczko: “Short, rather heavy-set
… high-strung, excitable. No lack
of self esteem” (Stanislaw Tarnowski).
Perhaps the natural son of the ill-famed Pelikan.

A sparkling stylist, the glory of la Reyne des Deux Mondes.
Worked with the Czartoryskis, then employed
by the Austrian ministry (there was no Polish).
He expires in Krakow, paralyzed, already dead.

So many more: Antoni Czapaki (* 1792),
studied painting in England and France, a mason
in the lodge of Chaste Samaritans: virtue personified.
Joachim Namyal, educator—we've reached the twentieth century.

Still more shadows, A to S:
this dictionary cannot be completed.

This is your country, your laconism.
Your indifference and your emotion.

So much life for just one homeland.
So much death for just one dictionary.

Translation from the Polish by Clare Cavanaugh.

Michael Dirda in The Washington Post:

Now widely regarded as Robert Silverberg's masterpiece, “Dying Inside,” first published in 1972, has just been reissued in a handsome trade paperback with a new preface by its author, one of science fiction's most distinguished writers. Yet this book is hardly what most people think of as science fiction. As a character, Selig has more in common with Philip Roth's Portnoy than with the more typical superwarriors of, say, Robert Heinlein's “Starship Troopers.” Instead, Silverberg's novel offers an eerily evocative picture of New York life in the late 1950s and '60s: a time of bisexual professors, swinging singles, Black Power, psychedelic drugs and all-round social and political upheaval. Given Selig's bookishness, the novel is also suffused with buried quotations from T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Lewis Carroll, Shakespeare and many other literary eminences.

Above all, though, “Dying Inside” is a pleasure to read, full of that dry humor so common to melancholic intellectuals. Selig's taste in music, we learn, runs to “pretty austere stuff, thorny, inaccessible: Schoenberg, late Beethoven, Mahler, Berg, the Bartok quartets, Bach passacaglias. Nothing that you'd be likely to whistle after one hearing.” At one time he contemplates writing a novel about — what else? — alienation in modern life.

More here.

From Science:

Stare at a waterfall long enough, and nearby stationary objects such as rocks and trees will seem to drift up. The optical illusion is called motion aftereffect, and it may trick more than just your eyes, according to a new study. When subjects watched a stationary stripe on a computer screen after a machine stroked their fingertips, the motion of the stroking created the illusion that the stripe was moving. The discovery demonstrates for the first time a two-way crosstalk between touch and vision, challenging long-held notions of how the brain organizes the senses.

In 2000, neuroscientist Christopher Moore, now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, noticed that when a vibrating device buzzed a subject's fingertips, the visual motion detector in the brain fired up. But he immediately dismissed the result. At the time, researchers thought that the brain processes each sense–taste, touch, smell, sight, and hearing–separately and that it only later combines them to interpret the world. Over the past 5 years, however, further studies have challenged this picture. Experiments with blind subjects, for example, have found that reading Braille by touch can trigger activity in the brain's visual cortex (ScienceNOW, 8 November 2002). Researchers attributed the phenomenon to the brain rewiring itself to compensate for disability. But Moore and graduate student Talia Konkle wondered if the sight-touch link might lurk in everyone and if one sense might influence the other.

(Note: Picture shows DaVinci's paintbrush. By tapping a pattern on a fingertip, this array can create an optical illusion.)

More here.

Speaking of mechanisms for optimal allocation of goods and services given initial endowments, scarcity and desire, the issue of the pricing of toxic assets is the challenge that determines the future of the financial system. John Carney in Business Insider:

The government's official view that toxic assets are incorrectly priced due to illiquidity “fire sales” is wrong, a new study by Harvard and Princeton finance professors suggests.

You can read the whole paper by Harvard's Joshua Coval and Erik Stafford and Princeton's Jakub Jurek below. The striking conclusion is that the low prices of toxic assets actually reflect the fundamentals, rather than being driven by an illiquidity discount.

“The analysis of this paper suggests that recent credit market prices are actually highly consistent with fundamentals. A structural framework confirms that bonds and credit derivatives should have experienced a significant repricing in 2008 as the economic outlook darkened and volatility increased. The analysis also confirms that severe mispricing existed in the structured credit tranches prior to the crisis and that a large part of the dramatic rise in spreads has been the elimination of this mispricing.”

Here is a video of Coval on the issue.

Rasmussen reports (I’m curious about the 9% of Republicans):

Only 53% of American adults believe capitalism is better than socialism.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 20% disagree and say socialism is better. Twenty-seven percent (27%) are not sure which is better.

Adults under 30 are essentially evenly divided: 37% prefer capitalism, 33% socialism, and 30% are undecided. Thirty-somethings are a bit more supportive of the free-enterprise approach with 49% for capitalism and 26% for socialism. Adults over 40 strongly favor capitalism, and just 13% of those older Americans believe socialism is better.

Investors by a 5-to-1 margin choose capitalism. As for those who do not invest, 40% say capitalism is better while 25% prefer socialism.

There is a partisan gap as well. Republicans – by an 11-to-1 margin – favor capitalism. Democrats are much more closely divided.

[H/t: Dan Balis]

It’s lost. All that is known of the poem are the following lines:

His quaint-perched aerie on the crags of Time Where the rude din of this…century Can trouble him no more.

This fragment carries a special power for me, as if I last heard it in the nursery. I seem, alas, to have set it on an internal loop to the tune of ‘Camptown Races’, that catchy chronicle of running and gambling. It drives me crazy when I can’t make it stop. Can trouble him no more! Trouble him no more! His quaint-perched aerie on the crags of Time Can trouble him no more! There’s no sense trying to guess the author: these lines were written when he was nine years old. Kids could write like this in the nineteenth century, if they were bright and had the right schooling. Oscar Wilde turned out reams of such stuff, and not only when he was a child.

more from Granta here.