Kevin Jackson in Prospect:

American literature came of age in the 19th century, and quite soon produced a remarkable crop of masters. Hawthorne and Melville; Emerson and Thoreau; Longfellow and Whitman; Twain… and very much the odd man out, Poe. Though many of them met with neglect and incomprehension in their lifetimes (Melville’s almost complete lapse into obscurity throughout his later life is the most notorious tale), their posthumous reputations have proved pretty sturdy. Yet one could reasonably argue that none of them has had such a far-reaching and protean influence as Poe—and not just the murky waters of mass culture, but also amid the loftier, more rarefied heights of elite culture.

This dual triumph is all the more improbable when you reflect that, by most standards, Poe was not a very good writer. The historian and critic Owen Dudley Edwards once drew up a list of routine accusations. Poe, he noted, was guilty of “endless self-indulgence, wallowing in atmosphere, incessant lecturing, ruthless discourse on whatever took the writer’s fancy, longueurs, trivialisations, telegraphing of punch-lines, loss of plot in effect, loss of effect in plot… In sum, what Poe lacked above all was a sense of his reader.”

Aldous Huxley pronounced Poe “vulgar,” with a show-off manner he likened to wearing a gaudy ring on every finger. Kingsley Amis admitted to enjoying some of the screen adaptations from the short stories, but thought Poe an execrable stylist. George Orwell acknowledged Poe’s acuity in the depiction of deranged characters but summed him up as “at worst… not far from being insane in the literal clinical sense.” So: a poseur, a poetaster, a borderline lunatic? There is surely some justice in these dismissals. One might go so far as to say that Poe is the worst writer ever to have had any claim to greatness.

More here. Bonus Poe-rtrait. 🙂

Daisy Grewal in Scientific American:

Movies and television shows are full of scenes where a man tries unsuccessfully to interact with a pretty woman. In many cases, the potential suitor ends up acting foolishly despite his best attempts to impress. It seems like his brain isn’t working quite properly and according to new findings, it may not be.

Researchers have begun to explore the cognitive impairment that men experience before and after interacting with women. A 2009 study demonstrated that after a short interaction with an attractive woman, men experienced a decline in mental performance. A more recent study suggests that this cognitive impairment takes hold even w hen men simply anticipate interacting with a woman who they know very little about.

More here.

From PhysOrg:

In the future according to robotics researchers, robots will likely fight our wars, care for our elderly, babysit our children, and serve and entertain us in a wide variety of situations. But as robotic development continues to grow, one subfield of robotics research is lagging behind other areas: roboethics, or ensuring that robot behavior adheres to certain moral standards. In a new paper that provides a broad overview of ethical behavior in robots, researchers emphasize the importance of being proactive rather than reactive in this area.

The big question, according to the researchers, is how we can ensure that future robotic technology preserves our humanity and our societies’ values. They explain that, while there is no simple answer, a few techniques could be useful for enforcing ethical behavior in robots. One method involves an “ethical governor,” a name inspired by the mechanical governor for the steam engine, which ensured that the powerful engines behaved safely and within predefined bounds of performance. Similarly, an ethical governor would ensure that robot behavior would stay within predefined ethical bounds. For example, for autonomous military robots, these bounds would include principles derived from the Geneva Conventions and other rules of engagement that humans use. Civilian robots would have different sets of bounds specific to their purposes.

More here.

Phoebe Greenwood in The Guardian:

The problem for Palestinian communities here is that permission to build any infrastructure is very hard to come by. According to figures from the civil administration quoted by the pressure group Peace Now, 91 permits were issued for Palestinian construction in Area C between 2001 and 2007. In the same period, more than 10,000 Israeli settlement units were built and1,663 Palestinian structures demolished.

The Jewish settlements in Area C are connected to the national water and electricity grids. But most Palestinian villages are cut off from basic infrastructure, including water and sewage services. Imneizil, which borders the ultra-religious settlement of Beit Yatir, currently has nine demolition orders on various structures, including a toilet block and water cistern for the school.

Comet ME is an Israeli NGO trying to circumvent these crippling restrictions on Palestinian development by harnessing Hebron's abundant natural energy sources – wind and sun.

Funded largely by the German government, the organisation has already provided tens of Palestinian villages with electricity through solar panels and wind turbines. Its goal is to reach all villages in the southern Hebron area by the end of 2013.

More here.

From Smithsonian:

Have you ever considered video games to be works of art? A show called The Art of Video Games, opening Friday at the American Art Museum, moves beyond looking at games simply as a form of entertainment and draws our attention to how games are a design and storytelling medium—perhaps the art medium of the 21st century. By the same token, have you ever stopped to think about how food figures into video games? Pac Man chows down on power pellets, Mario is a hardcore mushroom-monger, Donkey Kong a banana connoisseur. There have been games devoted to food fights or hamburger chefs being chased by manic pickles and sausages. Furthermore, ever since the video game boom of the late 1970s, games have been used as a means to advertise products—including edibles. While “advergaming” may be a recent piece of Internet age jargon to describe web-based games created to market a branded product, the concept has been kicking around since the dawn of video games. Here are a five notable games that were created to promote familiar foodstuffs.

Tapper (1983): Let’s start with arcade-era gaming. The premise of this one was simple: You are a bartender whose goal is to keep sliding beers down the bar to quench your customers’ thirst. This cabinet is noteworthy for its clever physical design: Bar-style beer taps are used to control your character and places to rest your drink. Players will also notice that the Budweiser logo is shown front-and-center and on the bar’s back wall. Although the game was initially meant to be installed in bars, it was re-tooled and re-christened Root Beer Tapper as a kid-appropriate game for arcades and home video gaming platforms.

More here.

Terror (The Making of a Pole Vaulter)

he was
….. a big
fucking guy
& we danced
around
his
rage
careful
not to set
him off
& it kept
us crazy
like cats
in a t-storm

& one day
i got
. loose
…. running
in my forest

.. a kind bird
of circumstance
handed me
a shaft
of pink
. white
light

to reach for
…. the angels
out there
who imagined
me flying

north beach

by Jim Bell
from Landing Amazed
Lily Pool Press 2010

In our topsy-turvy art world it is holy writ that Cindy Sherman’s photographs are not self-portraits. What else they are, I cannot imagine. No matter. Let the theorists proceed with their theories, undisturbed. What is without doubt is that Cindy Sherman’s work adds up to the biggest artistic ego trip of our time. I have the impression she has enjoyed herself. And—hell—she’s gotten rich in the process. What I wonder about are her facilitators—the curators, critics, dealers, collectors, gallerygoers, and museumgoers who have encouraged Cindy Sherman to camp it up like this for more than thirty years. That the world may ever so slowly be wearying of Sherman’s act is no surprise. Which does not mean her reputation is going to be eclipsed anytime soon. Far too much money is riding on her continued success. In the global art world, yesterday’s sensations are left to rot in public.

more from Jed Perl at The New Republic here.

The visceral criticism of Bernanke is hard to fathom, but it is in part the flip side of the enormous trust that we are asked to place in the modern Federal Reserve. At least in the time of Nicholas Biddle, and even during the formative years of the Fed, banknotes, being liabilities, could be redeemed for something of value, usually gold. Now our dollars are exchangeable only for more dollars. This is what alarms the originalists. As the publisher, Bernanke critic, and gold bug par excellence James Grant eloquently put it, “We have exchanged the gold standard for the Ph.D. standard, for soft central planning.” Originalists who are unhappy with quantitative easing are unhappy with elastic currency and with fiat money itself; nothing but gold will do. This has been true, of course, for 40 years—since the U.S. went off the gold standard—but only Bernanke has had to implement with such vigor the Fed’s original missions of “lender of last resort” and “coiner of an elastic currency.” And he is up there now, in the helicopter, showering us with money, as the Fed didn’t do but should have done in 1933. Yet even as this comforts, it elicits in most of us a spasm of wonder, or anxiety, that a single Ph.D. or a building full of them could calibrate such a mystery as the proper quantity of money, particularly in an economy as dynamic as ours is today. Bernanke does not use gold as a measuring stick; he does not count the money in circulation as a basis for determining interest rates, as Volcker did, or tried to do. His mentor, Milton Friedman, thought the business of adjusting interest rates was so tricky, it would be better to yield the job to a computer. But Bernanke thinks a human can do it. He sticks to his notion of what inflation should be, and his prediction of where it is headed, trusting that his judgment will tell him when to add more liquidity, when to subtract. And, to a greater extent than he is credited with now, history may marvel that Bernanke has been a success.

more from Roger Lowenstein at The Atlantic here.

There’s no foreclosure crisis in Manhattan. Or, for that matter, in the vibrant hearts of Chicago, San Francisco, or Portland, Ore. But head outward from these cities, into the suburban and exurban tracts in which America grew up, and the economic devastation stretches out for mile upon desolate mile of strip malls and abandoned developments. The housing boom that ended in 2006 saw home prices rise, making the economics of home building much more attractive. The arbitrage was easy, and developers across the country bought into it: buy up cheap suburban and exurban land, build as many huge houses on that land as possible, as quickly as possible, and then sell them at enormous prices to buyers with property-bubble fever. Never mind whether those buyers could actually afford that much house: so long as a bank would lend them the money, profit was assured. And of course the banks would lend anybody money, since they in turn could bundle and sell off their mortgages in the capital markets. But then the capital markets stopped buying (and offering) mortgages, leaving banks with huge amounts of bad debt and home builders with millions of unsold homes. The message of “Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream,” a new exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, is that it didn’t need to be this way—and that economic crises can have architectural solutions. But from the start, MoMA pulls its punches…

more from Felix Salmon at Architect here.

Akeel Bilgrami over at his homepage (image from wikipedia commons):

In reading Gandhi recently I have been struck by the integrity of his ideas. I don't mean simply that he was a man of integrity in the sense that he tried to make his actions live up to his ideals, though perhaps in fact he tried more than most to do so. I mean something more abstract: that his thought itself was highly integrated, his ideas about very specific political strategies in specific contexts flowed (and in his mind necessarily flowed) from ideas that were very remote from politics. They flowed from the most abstract epistemological and methodological commitments. This quality of his thought sometimes gets lost because, on the one hand, the popular interest in him has been keen to find a man of great spirituality and uniqueness and, on the other, the social scientist’s and historian’s interest in him has sought out a nationalist leader with a strikingly effective method of non-violent political action. It has been common for some decades now to swing from a sentimental perception of him as a “Mahatma” to a cooler assessment of Gandhi as “the shrewd politician”. I will steer past this oscillation because it hides the very qualities of his thought I want to uncover. The essay is not so much (in fact hardly at all) inspired by the plausibility of the philosophy that emerges as by the stunning intellectual ambition and originality that this 'integrity' displays.

2. Non-violence is a good place to get a first glimpse of what I have in mind. Violence has many sides. It can be spontaneous or planned, it can be individual or institutional, it can be physical or psychological, it can be delinquent or adult, it can be revolutionary or authoritarian. A great deal has been written on violence: on its psychology, on its possible philosophical justifications under certain circumstances, and of course on its long career in military history. Non-violence has no sides at all. Being negatively defined, it is indivisible. It began to be a subject of study much more recently and there is much less written on it, not merely because it is defined in negative terms but because until it became a self-conscious instrument in politics in this century, it was really constituted as or in something else.

Tim Parks in the New York Review of Books:

“Sir—” remarked Samuel Johnson with droll incredulity to someone too eager to know whether he had finished a certain book—“Sir, do you read books through?” Well, do we? Right through to the end? And if we do, are we the suckers Johnson supposed one must be to make a habit of finishing books?

Schopenhauer, who thought and wrote a great deal about reading, is on Johnson’s side. Life is “too short for bad books” and “a few pages” should be quite enough, he claims, for “a provisional estimate of an author’s productions.” After which it is perfectly okay to bail out if you’re not convinced.

But I’m not really interested in how we deal with bad books. It seems obvious that any serious reader will have learned long ago how much time to give a book before choosing to shut it. It’s only the young, still attached to that sense of achievement inculcated by anxious parents, who hang on doggedly when there is no enjoyment. “I’m a teenager,” remarks one sad contributor to a book review website. “I read this whole book [it would be unfair to say which] from first page to last hoping it would be as good as the reviews said. It wasn’t. I enjoy reading and finish nearly all the novels I start and it was my determination never to give up that made me finish this one, but I really wish I hadn’t.” One can only encourage a reader like this to learn not to attach self esteem to the mere finishing of a book, if only because the more bad books you finish, the fewer good ones you’ll have time to start.

But what about those good books?

More here.

Margaret Talbot in The New Yorker:

It would be hard to imagine a more unlikely historical moment than this one for birth control to become a matter of outraged political controversy. For starters, there is the statistic that ninety-nine per cent of all American women who have had sex have used contraception at some point in their lives. For Catholic women, the percentage is almost the same—ninety-eight per cent, according to an analysis released last spring by the Guttmacher Institute. Then, there’s the fact that we live in a society that has become remarkably dependent on the unfettered ambition of women. As the Washington Post reporter Liza Mundy writes in a new book, “The Richer Sex,” forty per cent of working wives now earn more than their husbands, and, by 2030, that number will probably rise to fifty per cent. Women already make up more than half of college and university students. By 2019, if current trends continue, they will make up fifty-nine per cent of total undergraduate enrollment, and sixty-one per cent of those enrolled in graduate programs. This is an economic and educational order predicated on the freedom of women, married and unmarried, to protect their own health and to decide when they’re going to have children.

As long as the debate stirred up by the Blunt Amendment—which would have allowed employers to refuse coverage for health services they felt compromised their religious beliefs—stayed focussed on freedom of religion, it was possible to forget that putting birth control back in political play meant ignoring reality. You could, after all, make a coherent argument about Catholic employers and the calls of conscience, without insisting on the moral turpitude of people who use birth control or talk about it in public. You could also argue that the Catholic hierarchy was basically asking the federal government to do what its own teachings apparently could not: to remind Catholic women of the evils of contraceptives in such a way that they would actually stop using them. But at least we were still in the realm of a legitimate policy debate.

Then Rush Limbaugh opened his mouth and showed us more than we wanted to know about the dank interior of his mind.

Justin E. H. Smith in Berfrois:

I dreamt last night that weight was bread. More precisely, I dreamt that a kilogram was a loaf of dark, rye-like, round bread, about the diameter of a steering wheel. I do not mean that the loaf represented the kilogram, or stood in for it conceptually, in the way that, say, an anatomical foot originally stood in for a unit of length. I mean that such a loaf is just what a kilogram was.

I was in some sort of shop, and the shopkeeper was trying to weigh something out for me on an old-fashioned scale. He kept having to remove whatever it was we were trying to weigh, and replace it with the loaves of bread. Since the loaves just were weight, only they could give any reading at all on a scale.

Plot-wise the dream was a bit thin, but it raised an important conceptual problem. It is as if the creation of a unit of measurement initiates a process of reification that, in its final stage, has us thinking about the unit as a definite, property-rich entity. I recall reading somewhere that some embarrassingly high number of Americans believe that calories exist in the same way marbles or eggs do: like little invisible pellets scattered in the food that makes people fat. And in turn the holy grail of the diet industry –a calorie-free fat substitute– is conceptualized as fat with the little pellets removed.

This neo-corpuscularianism can perhaps be seen more charitably if we recall that thing-hood is already contained within the concept of unit, a word which in many languages is identical to unity (e.g., Einheit, unité, единство). As Leibniz for one well understood, being and unity are practically the same. A Leibnizian corollary would also have it that whatever is not a thing is not really a unit(y) either, and further anything that is arbitrarily constituted cannot qualify as a thing. Nothing is more arbitrarily constituted than a so-called unit of measurement: there is absolutely no reason why a foot should not be three inches longer or shorter, and moreover nothing at all prevents us from conceptualizing fractions of these units.

So in effect we are being asked to conceptualize an impossible thing –units without unity– when we are asked to think about kilograms and feet and calories, and it may be that I, in my dream of the loaves, or the ignorant Americans polled on their dietetical knowledge, are in our mistake simply correcting something that was conceptually garbled to begin with.

Adam Branch in Al Jazeera:

From Kampala, the Kony 2012 hysteria was easy to miss. I'm not on Facebook or Twitter. I don't watch YouTube and the Ugandan papers didn't pick up the story for several days. But what I could not avoid were the hundreds of emails from friends, colleagues, and students in the US about the video by Invisible Children and the massive online response to it.

I have not watched the video. As someone who has worked in northern Uganda and researched the war there for more than a decade, much of it with a local human rights organisation based in Gulu, the Invisible Children organisation and their videos have often left me infuriated – I remember the sleepless nights after I watched their “Rough Cut” film for the first time with a group of students, after which I tried to explain to the audience what was wrong with the film while on stage with one of the filmmakers.

My frustration with the group has largely reflected the concerns expressed so convincingly by those online critics who have been willing to bring the fury of Invisible Children's true believers down upon themselves in order to point out what is wrong with this group's approach: the warmongering, the narcissism, the commercialisation, the reductive and one-sided story they tell, their portrayal of Africans as helpless children in need of rescue by white Americans.

More here.

A-J Aronstein in The Paris Review:

Glenn cultivated the persona of a tennis intellectual—something more than the average tennis pro. He smoked Benson and Hedges, ate an alarming number of Kit-Kat Bars, and lived in Brooklyn. He collected art and quoted Fitzgerald. On the occasion of my sixth-grade graduation, he gave me an inscribed copy of Bulfinch’s Mythology. He commuted to the club every day wearing blazers over black T-shirts and pleated khaki slacks, making for an odd juxtaposition with my father, whom I never saw wearing anything but tennis whites in the months between May and November.

For Glenn, tennis was a purely mental game, its problems solvable through a personal variation on psychoanalysis. He broke down my own palsied serve into three movements, suggesting that I mouth the words “I. DON’T. CARE!” in rhythm with them. He added that I should shout CARE! as I smacked the ball toward the earth. By getting me to renounce my emotional attachment, I guess he thought that I could free up mental energies to enjoy myself. There was something intoxicating about the idea that the mind could exert too much control over the body and that there could be freedom from the mind’s tyranny in the ability to let the body take the helm. But I never thought it was actually possible. It wasn’t until years later, when I found David Foster Wallace’s essays on tennis, that I encountered what seemed like a written version of Glenn’s approach. Wallace scrupulously details the sport’s Euclidian logic, its between-the-ears acrobatics, its mid-August sweatiness, its production of near-divine feats of athletic perfection. He obsesses over the labor and dedication necessary to become a world-class anything, and though he’s writing about tennis, he’s also writing about writing. The essays mattered to me precisely because of this connection, and I read them just as I was beginning to take my first stabs at translating childhood material into short fiction. Yet for Wallace, tennis entails intense aloneness, standing seventy-eight feet away from one’s opponent, warring within and against one’s own brain. Tennis represents an entirely individual struggle to wrest control from the mind: to be at once fully conscious of oneself and yet able to stop thinking. For me, tennis represented something else. Maybe history, inheritance. Maybe just trying to figure out what to pass on (a service motion, a slice backhand, a tennis club, a philosophy). I’m still figuring it out. Glenn died the same summer I started reading Wallace. My father scattered his ashes in the Har-Tru on court three, where Glenn tried to teach me not to care and seems to have taught me the opposite.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Talk about sleepless nights. Patients taking prescription sleep aids on a regular basis were nearly five times as likely as non-users to die over a period of two and a half years, according to a recent study. Even those prescribed fewer than 20 pills a year were at risk, the researchers found; heavy users also were more likely to develop cancer. Unsurprisingly, the findings, published online in the journal BMJ, have caused a quite a stir. Americans filled some 60 million prescriptions for sleeping pills last year, up from 47 million in 2006, according to IMS Health, a health care services company. Panicked patients have been calling doctors’ offices seeking reassurance; some others simply quit the pills cold turkey.

Some experts were quick to point out the study’s shortcomings. The analysis did not prove that sleeping pills cause death, critics noted, only that there may be a correlation between the two. And while the authors suggested the sleeping pills were a factor in the deaths, those who use sleep aids tend as a group to be sicker than those who don’t use them. The deaths may simply be a reflection of poorer health. Still, the findings underscore concern about the exploding use of sleeping pills. Experts say that many patients, especially the elderly, should exercise more caution when using sleep medications, including the non-benzodiazepine hypnotics so popular today, like zolpidem (brand name Ambien), eszopiclone (Lunesta) and zaleplon (Sonata).

More here.

Matt Bieber in The Wheat and Chaff:

MATT BIEBER: My sense is that you believe that our contemporary political discourse doesn’t place much value on getting at the truth. Is that right?

CHRISTOPHER ROBICHAUD: I think that’s true. I’m open to someone with more of a historical eye informing me that it’s always been bad. But I also think that there’s a certain zeitgeist going on right now of the form: How can we live in an age so rich in information, with so many educated people across the world, and still seem to be susceptible to such embarrassing and deep ignorance? You would have hoped at this point that a civil society would agree on the basic facts and could get about disagreeing about the interesting things – what to do about them. That’s where disagreements are supposed to happen.

But no, we don’t even agree on the basic facts. You look at the climate science debate. [Makes air quotes.] There’s a lot to disagree with about what the way forward is, about how bad it’s going to get and how soon – there’s a lot of things we don’t know. But there’s a lot of things we do know, and those are the things that are still being contested – it’s an embarrassment.

More here.