IF THE WORD ‘labyrinth’ does not lead us eventually back to the very earliest human communities, it has a good try. The Greek labyrinthos appears to be a linguistic echo from Egypt and Asia Minor. It is possible that it relates to labrys, a double-edged axe, emblem of the Cretan royal family. No one is certain, since tracing the origin of the word ‘labyrinth’ is itself an etymological labyrinth. It creeps into something like modern English as laboryntus in Chaucer’s House of Fame and has become by the early fifteenth century laberynthe, a maze. Except for specialised usages the terms ‘maze’ and ‘labyrinth’ then become almost indistinguishable in English. Fanshawe’s seventeenth-century Horatian translations talk about clews and mazes, so we are back with the Cretan labyrinth and Ariadne’s bobbined thread, which permitted Theseus to find his way out of the maze after he had executed his monster. Such a thread was a clew, or ball of yarn, providing us with our modern word ‘clue’. THE SENSE INITIALLY was of a structure designed to baffle and disorientate; to prevent curiosity; to hide that which must not be found, either because it was sacred or because it was shameful. It may not always be a minotaur in there (and see below), but there will be something whose immediate disclosure is either undesirable or forbidden. It could be a monster, a priest or a crocodile.

more from Alan Wall at The Fortnightly Review here.

I s there a “right” view of Hamlet? The very question presupposes he is a personage or a historical entity, rather than a created dramatic character. Margaret Litvin’s absorbing study examines this confected persona as it has appeared in the Arab world, especially as it emerged reborn from the fervent matrix of modern Egyptian politics. She supplies a fascinating account of the translations which came at first to Arabic through French versions, which were often heavily cut and bowdlerized. In Dumas’s influential version, the character of Fortinbras was omitted, and the opening scene on the battlements was completely cut. English literary influences were later arrivals, and interpreted locally with anti-colonial implications (Muhammad Hamdi’s 1912 edition of Julius Caesar described the author as “William Shakespeare, the democratic English poet and playwright”). If Arab audiences viewed Hamlet as a heroic figure, it was at first mainly as a fighter against colonial tyranny, engaged in a struggle against the usurper. This was the role that leaders such as Nasser originally adopted: only later in their political careers did they themselves become the tyrants, the “Claudius” figures against whom the younger generation had to act.

more from Jane Jakeman at the TLS here.

My relations with Tony Judt date back a long time but they were curiously contradictory. We were friends, though not intimate ones, and while both of us were politically committed historians, and both preferred wearing informal gear as historians rather than regimental uniform, we marched to different drummers. Nevertheless our intellectual interests had something in common. Both of us knew that the 20th century can only be understood fully by those who became historians because they lived through it and shared its basic passion: namely the belief that politics was the key to our truths as well as our myths. In spite of our differences, both Tony’s Marxism and the French Left and my own recent How to Change the World are dedicated to the memory of the same independent thinker, the late George Lichtheim. We got on well in personal terms – but then Tony was easy to like, and generous. He thought very well of my own work and said so in his last book. At the same time he launched one of the most implacable attacks on me in a passage which has become widely quoted, especially by the ultras of the right-wing American press. It amounted to: make a public confession that your god has failed, beat your breast and you may win the right to be taken seriously. No man who doesn’t think socialism equals Gulag should be listened to. It was no doubt a sincerely felt rhetorical figure in an anti-red polemic. Fortunately practice differed from theory. For most of us the image of Tony is dominated by the boundless admiration we feel for the way he confronted his death.

more from Eric Hobsbawm at the LRB here.

From Scientific American:

Physicists have long thought that the Higgs particle should exist but have yet to find it. With the aid of the Large Hadron Collider in Europe, the elusive Higgs boson may finally come out of hiding. In the clip, Higgs, now an emeritus professor at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, tells of his nerve-racking 1964 presentation at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., when his ideas still ran counter to conventional wisdom. Also featured in the video are physicists Joseph Lykken of Fermilab, Raphael Bousso of the University of California, Berkeley, and Leonard Susskind of Stanford University.

More here.

From MSNBC:

Even a humble sea slug can be stylish, if you find the right slug in the right place. That's what photographer Ximena Olds did when she snapped a picture of an orange headshield sea slug amid the green seagrass in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Her contrasting-color picture took the top prize in this year's Underwater Photography Contest, hosted by the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science. More than 700 images were submitted for the 2012 contest, showing scenes from 20 countries. Awards were given in several categories, including Macro, Wide Angle, and Fish or Marine Mammal Portrait. Another category was set aside for University of Miami students. Olds' photo was submitted in the Macro category but was singled out for the “Best Overall” prize.

More here.

Richard Marshall interviews Patricia Churchland in 3AM Magazine:

3:AM: Your approach to philosophy may strike some as being not really philosophical. This is because you place neuroscience at the heart of your approach. Can you say something about why you think this approach has caused some people to worry that it undermines the claims of philosophical enquiry proper and how you respond?

PC: Philosophical enquiry proper – mmmmmm is that the sort of thing Aristotle and Hume were doing, or the sort of thing that Kripke and Gettier were doing? Let me sound curmudgeonly for a moment: if I want to know how people use words, I will go to sociolinguists, who actually do science to try to find those things out. If I want to know how we learn and remember and represent the world, I will go to psychology and neuroscience. If I want to know where values come from, I will go to evolutionary biology and neuroscience and psychology, just as Aristotle and Hume would have, were they alive.

Theorizing is of course essential to make progress in understanding, but theorizing in the absence of knowing available relevant facts is not very productive. Given how long philosophers have been at conceptual analysis (I mean the 20th century stuff), and how many have been doing it, what can we say are the two most important concept results of all that effort? By ‘important’ here, let’s mean ‘has a significant impact outside philosophy on how people understand something’. Otherwise, as Feyerabend said, we are just talking to ourselves; taking in each other’s laundry. Incidentally, the analytic claim that knowledge is “true justified belief” does not accord with how ordinary people in fact use the word “know”. So whose concept is being analyzed? When philosophers try to understand consciousness, much of what they claim is not conceptual analysis at all, though it may be shopped under that description. Actually, they are really offering a theory about the nature of consciousness. When that theory is isolated from known facts, it is likely not to be productive.

Brent Cox in The Awl:

In 1967, Patti Smith wrote in Just Kids, she was considering a move to New York City. “I had enough money for a one-way ticket. I planned to hit all the bookstores in the city. This seemed ideal work to me.” Twenty-seven years before her, in 1940, Shirley Jackson and her soon-to-be husband Stanley Hyman graduated from Syracuse and moved to New York. According to this biography, “For quite some time they had known exactly what they were going to do: move to New York City, live as cheaply as possible, take menial jobs if necessary and wait for the Big Break. Not just wait—push for it.”

And fifteen years before that: “The first week of January 1925, Zora Neale Hurston moved to New York City, as she recalled, with a dollar and fifty cents in her purse, 'no job, no friends, and a lot of hope,'” as one of her biographers put it.

The equivalent young female writer arriving in New York in search of literary success in 2012 (as calculated by the CPI Inflation Calculator) would have $19.51 in her purse, which could buy breakfast at Balthazar, or a pack of smokes and one Happy Hour cocktail, or about ten hours' rent.

We've looked at how much the costs of things like Reeses peanut butter cups and TV sets have changed over time—very specific items. Let's cast a wider net. For more than a century, the young flock to New York as the place to launch a career in the arts. Is it as expensive a proposition now as it always has been? Has the size of the potential rewards increased or decreased? And more importantly, just what was it like? In what ways was hanging at the Algonquin Roundtable just like (and not like) bumming around the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel? Let's look at the Bohemian set over time, as seen through the eyes (and pocketbooks) of some of the women writers we've been reading for decades, from Dorothy Parker and Hurston onward to today.

From The New York Times:

There are good ways and bad ways to die. Then there was the death afforded, around A.D. 750, to a Persian political adviser named Ibn al-Muqaffa. His limbs were dispatched from his body, and he was forced to watch as they were roasted slowly in an oven. This punishment was visited upon Muqaffa in part because he’d committed blasphemy. He’d apparently suggested that the Shariah — God’s law under Islam — be codified into written rules to facilitate a just society. It’s hard to blame him for his longing. As Sadakat Kadri notes in “Heaven on Earth,” his thorough and admirable new book about the history of Islamic law, the Koran authorized the punishment of just four crimes: theft, fornication, false witness and waging war against Islam. How was a practical government to rule about everything else? To a citizen with a land dispute or a medical malpractice claim, jurisprudence could seem as arbitrary as a Ouija board’s spirit message. Like so many people who have been gruesomely tortured throughout history, Muqaffa’s real offense was to be ahead of his time. Islam did slowly develop a written form of the Shariah — an Arabic word whose meanings included, in a phrase that must have seemed especially lovely to a desert people, a direct path to water. Today the confusion, Mr. Kadri makes plain in “Heaven on Earth,” is how to interpret this wide-ranging series of edicts, some from the Koran and many others based on hadiths, which are reports about the Prophet Muhammad written more than a century after his death. Scholars have sets of interpretations; increasingly freelance jihadists have their own. The author declares more than once, in contempt of the repressive and violent who interpret the Shariah selectively, that “claiming divine authority is not the same as possessing it.” Mr. Kadri, a Muslim by birth, was born in London. He is a half-Finnish and half-Pakistani English barrister with a master’s degree from Harvard Law School, where he overlapped with Barack Obama. He is nearly as multicultural as one man can get without falling over. His previous book is “The Trial: A History, From Socrates to O. J. Simpson” (2005). He’s an alert writer with an alert interest in tolerance: he has done work for the American Civil Liberties Union.

Mr. Kadri’s background gives him a grounded and many-angled perspective on Islamic law. He finds a great deal to admire in it, and he is deft at dispelling myths. Stoning, for example, is not mentioned in the Koran as a punishment for adultery. In his reading of the Shariah, he finds rationality and flexibility. His argument is with recent hard-liners who, he writes, “have turned Islamic penal history on its head.” He is furious that fundamentalists “have associated the Shariah in many people’s minds with some of the deadliest legal systems on the planet.” He calls them traditionalists who ignore tradition. He is disgusted that warped opinions “are mouthed today to validate murder after murder in Islam’s name.”

More here.

From Scientific American:

In search of nectar, a honeybee flies into a well-manicured suburban garden and lands on one of several camellia bushes planted in a row. After rummaging through the ruffled pink petals of several flowers, the bee leaves the first bush for another. Finding hardly any nectar in the flowers of the second bush, the bee flies to a third. And so on. Our brains may have evolved to forage for some kinds of memories in the same way, shifting our attention from one cluster of stored information to another depending on what each patch has to offer. Recently, Thomas Hills of the University of Warwick in England and his colleagues found experimental evidence for this potential parallel. “Memory foraging” is only one way of thinking about memory—and it does not apply universally to all types of information retained in the brain—but, so far, the analogy seems to work well for particular cases of active remembering.

Hills and his colleagues asked 141 Indiana University Bloomington students to type the names of as many animals as they could think of in three minutes. For decades, psychologists have used such “verbal fluency tasks” to study memory and diseases in which memory breaks down, such as Alzheimer's and dementia. Again and again, researchers have found that people name animals—or vegetables or movies—in clusters of related items. They might start out saying “cat, dog, goldfish, hamster”—animals kept as pets—and then, having exhausted that subcategory, move onto ocean animals: “dolphin, whale, shark, octopus.” On average, the students in Hills's experiment named 37 animals in three minutes and, like so many of their predecessors, the lists they typed were organized into groups of animals unified by a single theme—pets, the savanna, etcetera. What Hills and his colleagues really wanted to know was whether the students shifted from one themed cluster to another the same way some animals hop from patch to patch of food. To make the most of its time and get the most food possible, a bird feeding on berries, for example, should only stay on any one particular bush if the plant will yield more berries than nearby bushes. At some point, the bird has eaten so many berries on the first bush that it makes more sense to switch to one with more to offer.

More here.

A Poem I Wrote Standing Up- Indictment

We are proud to be Africans on distant shores,
learning ancient tongues, fighting for their survival,
while forgetting our own.
We adopt new inflections
and sing-song ways of speaking
to camouflage our origins,
hiding from the tainted brush.
We are the new Celts – darker, more robust.
We sanction our memories of sun and hunger
and hopeful hopelessness.
We unlearn our songs and disappear through our children –
the pristine generation, unmarked by unpopular citizenry.
We are not proud. We are not Africans.

by Blessing Musariri
publisher: PIW, 2011

A man with a briefcase arrives in a place called City-A looking like a double agent from 1973: mustachioed and trenchcoated, forever ducking into phone booths for cryptic conversations. The man, Mr. Holz, is a geophysicist of unknown origin. He has come here to work for the New Method Oil Well Cementing Company. City-A is mesmerizingly bleak, a grid of concrete high-rises set between a brackish sea and a wintry industrial wasteland, all of it reeking of environmental contamination and failed utopia. Many things, Holz notices, are amiss here. Clocks don’t run sixty seconds to the minute in City-A. The drinking water is spiked with lithium, a shadowy entity has confiscated his passport, language is rationed, and what exactly is this New Method Oil Well Cementing Company, anyway? As the bewildered-looking Holz moves through the city, is he piecing together clues to solve these mysteries or just being shuttled around by a powerful unseen force?

more from Jane Yager at the Paris Review here.

Vladislavić is one of the great writers of the fragment. The two works preceding Double Negative, The Exploded View (2004) and Portrait with Keys (2006), both attest to this. The Exploded View is a novel in four parts, one for each of four protagonists—a statistician gathering census data, a civil engineer working on post-apartheid housing developments, a market-savvy artist (who makes a delightful return in Double Negative), and an erector of billboards. All of them have a privileged perspective on life and society in Vladislavić’s home city, Johannesburg. Vladislavić calls the The Exploded View a novel, and though the juries of literary prizes disagree with him, I think this is a claim to be taken seriously. A case could be made that the novel’s divided form is justified by its object: Johannesburg, which is, as cliché would have it, the “divided” city. But Vladislavić’s tightly knit prose belies this diagnosis. Sensitive readers are struck by the uncanny repetitions, haunting resonances, and resounding echoes across the novel’s parts: by the work’s and the city’s unity, not their partition. Portrait with Keys is a collection of 138 short pieces about the city, which can be read in order, at random, or according to one of the suggested “itineraries” included with a map at the back of the book. This book is classified as “non-fiction,” and this time the juries of literary prizes do agree. The “portrait” in 138 brush-strokes has two subjects: the city and the artist himself. Both are rendered in imbricated, mutually enriching fragments, forming a nuanced whole. Neither rendering would be out of place in the very best fiction.

more from Jan Steyn at The Quarterly Conversation here.

The Sufferings of Young Werther (otherwise known as The Sorrows of Young Werther) appeared in 1774. Goethe sent a synopsis to a friend: I present a young person gifted with deep, pure feeling and true penetration, who loses himself in rapturous dreams, buries himself in speculation, until at last, ruined by unhappy passions that supervene, in particular an unfulfilled love, puts a bullet in his head. This synopsis is notable for the distance Goethe seems to be putting between himself and a hero whose story was in important respects his own. He too had gloomily asked himself whether a self-defeating compulsion did not underlie his practice of falling in love with unattainable women; he too had contemplated suicide, though he had lacked the courage to do the deed. The crucial difference between himself and Werther was that he could call on his art to diagnose and expel the malaise that afflicted him, whereas Werther could only suffer it. As Thomas Mann put it, Werther is “the young Goethe himself, minus the creative gift.” Two energies go into the making of Werther: the confessional, which gives the book its tragic emotional force, and the political. Passionate and idealistic, Werther is representative of the best of a new generation of Germans sensitive to the stirrings of history, impatient to see the renewal of a torpid social order.

more from J.M. Coetzee at the NYRB here.

Peter Reuell in the Harvard Gazette:

Last year, Stephen Greenblatt, the John Cogan University Professor of the Humanities, took home a National Book Award for nonfiction for “The Swerve: How the World Became Modern.” Today he was recognized with another prestigious literary prize.

Greenblatt’s book, which describes how an ancient Roman philosophical epic helped pave the way for modern thought, was awarded the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction.

In its citation, the Pulitzer board described “The Swerve” as “a provocative book arguing that an obscure work of philosophy, discovered nearly 600 years ago, changed the course of history by anticipating the science and sensibilities of today.”

The book tells the story of Lucretius’ “On the Nature of Things,” which 2,000 years ago posited a number of revolutionary ideas — that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very small particles in eternal motion, colliding and swerving in new directions.

Once thought lost, the poem was rediscovered on a library shelf in the winter of 1417 by a Poggio Bracciolini. The copying and translation of the book fueled the Renaissance, inspiring artists such as Botticelli and thinkers such as Giordano Bruno; shaped the thought of Galileo and Freud, Darwin and Einstein; and had a revolutionary influence on writers such as Montaigne and Shakespeare and even Thomas Jefferson.

More here.

William G. Eberhard and William T. Wcislo in American Scientist:

By focusing on evolutionary increases in brain size, biologists generally have overlooked nervous system organization in the smallest of animals. But when one looks closely at very small animals, an important question emerges: Where can a relatively large brain fit in a small body? The answers displayed by one animal after another deliver a new perspective on variation in nervous system design among animals. And this variation calls into question some basic assumptions regarding the uniformity of how central nervous systems function overall. In other words, much remains to be learned from the smallest of the small.

More here.

Vali Nasr at Bloomberg:

One new twist that should be particularly gratifying to the U.S. is the Pakistani public’s unexpected turn against the military. Popular anger at the U.S. for swooping into the country to kill bin Laden was matched by outrage that the military was caught snoozing by U.S. commandos. Pakistanis asked: Why do we need such an expensive military if it can’t even protect the country’s borders and doesn’t know that the world’s most wanted man is hiding in a garrison town?

If that weren’t enough, three weeks later, extremists attacked the naval base in Karachi, which houses nuclear warheads. They destroyed a helicopter and two advanced P-3C Orion patrol aircraft. Pakistani special forces lost 10 men and had to fight for 16 hours to end the siege.

More embarrassments followed. Impassioned appeals to the Supreme Court to find President Asif Ali Zardari a traitor backfired on the army and intelligence chiefs when the credibility of their witness, who had claimed that Zardari was colluding with the U.S. against the military, dissolved amid the man’s ever-changing story and his cameo in a mud-wrestling video. Next, the Supreme Court opened hearings in a case alleging that the military bought votes in the 1990 election. The televised spectacle of generals hauled to court to answer judges has mesmerized Pakistanis.

The humbling of the military is good news for democracy in Pakistan. National elections may take place as early as October and must occur by February. With the military restrained, there is hope that voting will be free and fair, and that the outcome may further strengthen civilian rule.

More here.

Click here to watch.

From the Top of the Stairs

Of course
those who are standing at the top of the stairs
know
they know everything

with us it's different
sweepers of squares
hostages of a better future
those at the top of the stairs
appear to us rarely
with a hushing finger always at the mouth

we are patient
our wives darn the sunday shirts
we talk of food rations
soccer prices of shoes
while on saturday we tilt the head backward
and drink

we aren't those
who clench their fists
brandish chains
talk and ask questions
in a fever of excitement
urging to rebel
incessantly talking and asking questions

here is their fairy tale –
we will dash at the stairs
and capture them by storm
the heads of those who were standing at the top
will roll down the stairs
and at last we will gaze
at what can be seen from those heights
what future
what emptiness

we don't desire the view
of rolling heads
we know how easily heads grow back
and at the top there will always remain
one or three
while at the bottom it is black from brooms and shovels

sometimes we dream
those at the top of the stairs
come down
that is to us
and as we are chewing bread over the newspaper
they say

– now let's talk
man to man
what the posters shout out isn't true
we carry the truth in tightly locked lips
it is cruel and much too heavy
so we bear the burden by ourselves
we aren't happy
we would gladly stay
here

these are dreams of course
they can come true
or not come true
so we will
continue to cultivate
our square of dirt
square of stone

with a light head
a cigarette behind the ear
and not a drop of hope in the heart

From Himal Southasian:

Women Sufi poets were part of a widespread emancipation movement in the Indian Subcontinent and West Asia that started more than a thousand years ago and lasted till the nineteenth century. Interestingly, these poets fought for women’s rights at a time when that concept was still unformulated. This movement saw the emergence of women saints on an unprecedented scale, and was one of the most significant characteristics of the medieval age in West Asia and Southasia. Mystic women poets subverted conventional notions of gendered behaviour, helping women to defy stereotypes and break the chains of tradition and orthodoxy, which sought to control their sexuality. In the spiritual sphere of Sufism, physical distinction between male and female was often completely overlooked and the two were fused and identified. Many of the saints believed that all creation, being the product of the supreme creative power, was feminine.