Justin Smith over at his blog:

In a fine introduction to a recent edition of The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), William Gass writes that what he admires most about Robert Burton's life-work is “the width of the world that can be seen from one college window…; what a love of all can be felt by one who has lived it sitting in a chair.” Burton’s Anatomy, indeed, often gives the impression that its author set out to create a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art whose aim was nothing less than to reproduce the world.

As with the Internet, the result is clumsy and chaotic, and Burton recognizes as much; and yet, in this way, both haphazard and cloistered, he manages to create, over the course of a life, a thousand-page mirror of the world:

I have confusedly tumbled over divers authors in our libraries, with small profit for want of art, order, memory, judgment. I never travelled but in map or card, in which my unconfined thoughts have freely expatiated, as having ever been especially delighted with the study of cosmography… A mere spectator of other men’s fortunes and adventures, and how they act their parts, which methinks are diversely presented unto me, as from a common theatre or scene.

Burton loved the world, though he knew it almost entirely through the books he kept in his cell. While at nearly the same moment in European history, Burton’s contemporaries, such as René Descartes, were denouncing ‘book learning’ as inauthentic, as an impediment to true knowledge, Burton reminds us, as Gass so well understands of his predecessor, that whether out in the world or locked in our cell, it is the human mind that is doing most of the work of experience anyway; a rich, full life may be led with only the most two-dimensional of stimuli to carry it along. The Anatomy of Melancholy is proof of this.

Today, too, the Internet can seem an impediment to many of what are thought to be our more authentic experiences. But it may also be facilitating the sort of experience we have always had, qua human beings, experience based in love, which can be had just as intensely in virtual form (letters from friends, books about nature, the Internet), as in ‘reality’ (seeing friends face-to-face, going camping). Sometimes I imagine I am feeling a love of the world as strong as Burton’s when I click, say, on a link from the Wikipedia entry on the Finno-Ugric languages to the entry on the Samoyed people of the Russian Arctic, and from there to the entry, written in Samoyed, on reindeer. There is so much out there, and it’s all in here!

True enough, in here, in this hyperlinked, screen-shaped reproduction of the world, what we find for the most part is a great mess “of barbarism, Doric dialect, extemporanean style, tautologies, apish imitation, a rhapsody of rags gathered together from several dung-hills, excrements of authors, toys and fopperies confusedly tumbled out, wihout art, invention, judgment, wit, learning, harsh, indigested, vain, scurrile, idle, dull, and dry.” But this is nothing new, and as Burton shows, it is the variety stacked upon variety, and the detail squeezed between details, the inexhaustible proliferation of adjectives, that makes this whole mess a mirror of human ingenium.

The stakes of Adorno and Horkheimer’s influential revision of Marxism emerges in the new translation of their dialogue Towards a New Manifesto. The title is an inspired misnomer; it is hard to see how “Discussion on Theory and Praxis”—the original title in Horkheimer’s Nachlass—would attract any but the most dedicated readers. But what makes the brief volume—113 generously spaced pages—so engaging and what partially legitimates the English title, is the space devoted to a reassessment of key Marxist concepts. We should “write a manifesto that will do justice to the current situation,” Adorno says (92) and he adds a surprising addendum: it should be “a strictly Leninist manifesto” (94). Despite Adorno’s thoroughgoing use of Marxist terminology, his explicit engagement with Marx is slim (roughly four essays in an extensive body of writing are devoted to class analysis). In the twelve discussions that make up Towards a New Manifesto nearly half revolve around the problem of work and “political concreteness.” But as Adorno and Horkheimer make clear, their theory “no longer has anything in common with Marx, with the most advanced class consciousness; our thoughts are no longer a function of the proletariat” (99).

more from Todd Cronan and his responders at nonsite here.

Eugene Genovese’s scholarship made an enormous difference despite the challenges that he faced. As a self-proclaimed Marxist, he had to make his way through an unreceptive professional discipline – history – in a country still feeling the effects of McCarthyism, and he took on one of the central areas of historical interpretation, the coming and significance of the Civil War. What got him a hearing and then the notice of distinguished historians like C. Vann Woodward and David Potter was the breadth of his research, the clarity of his arguments, and the respect he paid to intellectual adversaries (sometimes more than they deserved). At a time when most scholars thought the debates over the Civil War had largely been resolved and a “consensus” interpretation reigned supreme, Genovese wrote of a fundamental, and revolutionary, battle between two different and increasingly antagonistic societies: a bourgeois North and a pre-capitalist South. In a series of immensely influential books – especially The Political Economy of Slavery (1965), and The World the Slaveholders Made (1969) – he insisted that slavery established the foundation of a radically different order in the southern states, limited the course of southern economic development, and gave rise to a pre-bourgeois ruling class that fashioned a distinctively reactionary world view.

more from Steven Hahn at TNR here.

The most entertaining episode in western literature’s 200-year-long fight over who loves Jane Austen most took place in 1940, when a psychiatrist and literary critic named DW Harding published an essay called “Regulated Hatred: An Aspect of the Work of Jane Austen.” His argument was simple: “[Jane Austen’s] books are, as she meant them to be, read and enjoyed by precisely the sort of people whom she disliked.” Whether this is an accurate description of Austen’s own feelings towards her imagined readership (I don’t think it is), “regulated hatred” is a perfect name for the feelings Austen lovers often bear towards one another. “Anyone who has the temerity to write about Jane Austen,” said Virginia Woolf, “is aware… that there are 25 elderly gentlemen living in the neighbourhood of London who resent any slight upon her genius as if it were an insult to the chastity of their Aunts.”

more from Richard Beck at Prospect Magazine here.

New Year's

Let other mornings honor the miraculous.
Eternity has festivals enough.
This is the feast of our mortality,
The most mundane and human holiday.

On other days we misinterpret time,
Pretending that we live the present moment.
But can this blur, this smudgy in-between,
This tiny fissure where the future drips

Into the past, this flyspeck we call now
Be our true habitat? The present is
The leaky palm of water that we skim
From the swift, silent river slipping by.

The new year always brings us what we want
Simply by bringing us along—to see
A calendar with every day uncrossed,
A field of snow without a single footprint.

by Dana Gioia
from Interrogations at Noon
© Graywolf Press, 2001.

From The Telegraph:

From Scientific American:

In the 1970s biologist Sydney Brenner and his colleagues began preserving tiny hermaphroditic roundworms known as Caenorhabditis elegans in agar and osmium fixative, slicing up their bodies like pepperoni and photographing their cells through a powerful electron microscope. The goal was to create a wiring diagram—a map of all 302 neurons in the C. elegans nervous system as well as all the 7,000 connections, or synapses, between those neurons. In 1986 the scientists published a near complete draft of the diagram. More than 20 years later, Dmitri Chklovskii of Janelia Farm Research Campus and his collaborators published an even more comprehensive version. Today, scientists call such diagrams “connectomes.” So far, C. elegans is the only organism that boasts a complete connectome. Researchers are also working on connectomes for the fruit fly nervous system and the mouse brain. In recent years some neuroscientists have proposed creating a connectome for the entire human brain—or at least big chunks of it. Perhaps the most famous proponent of connectomics is Sebastian Seung of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose impressive credentials, TED talk, popular book, charisma and distinctive fashion sense (he is known to wear gold sneakers) have made him a veritable neuroscience rock star.

More here.

Over at Rationally Speaking Massimo Pigliucci and Julia Galef talk to Graham Priest:

For all the time Massimo and Julia have spent discussing and debating philosophy on Rationally Speaking, so far, it's all been philosophy from Europe and North America. What about the philosophical traditions of, for example, Asia? In this episode, professor of philosophy Graham Priest offers a brief introduction to the philosophy of India, China, and Japan, and explains why he thinks it should be better known in the West.

Graham's pick: “The Tristan Chord: Wagner and Philosophy”

Ben Woodard in Berfrois:

I want to propose, as a trajectory into the philosophically weird, an absurd theoretical claim and pursue it, or perhaps more accurately, construct it as I point to it, collecting the ground work behind me like the Perpetual Train from China Mieville’s Iron Council which puts down track as it moves reclaiming it along the way. The strange trajectory is the following: Kant’s critical philosophy and much of continental philosophy which has followed, has been a defense against horror and madness. Kant’s prohibition on speculative metaphysics such as dogmatic metaphysics and transcendental realism, on thinking beyond the imposition of transcendental and moral constraints, has been challenged by numerous figures proceeding him. One of the more interesting critiques of Kant comes from the mad black Deleuzianism of Nick Land stating, “Kant’s critical philosophy is the most elaborate fit of panic in the history of the Earth.” And while Alain Badiou would certainly be opposed to the libidinal investments of Land’s Deleuzo-Guattarian thought, he is likewise critical of Kant’s normative thought-bureaucracies:

Kant is the one author for whom I cannot feel any kinship. Everything in him exasperates me, above all his legalism—always asking Quid Juris? Or ‘Haven’t you crossed the limit?’—combined, as in today’s United States, with a religiosity that is all the more dismal in that it is both omnipresent and vague. The critical machinery he set up has enduringly poisoned philosophy, while giving great succour to the academy, which loves nothing more than to rap the knuckles of the overambitious [….] That is how I understand the truth of Monique David-Menard’s reflections on the properly psychotic origins of Kantianism (La Folie dans la raison pure). I am persuaded that the whole of the critical enterprise is set up to to shield against the tempting symptom represented by the seer Swedenborg, or against ‘diseases of the head’, as Kant puts it (535-536).

An entire nexus of the limits of reason and philosophy are set up here, namely that the critical philosophy not only defends thought from madness, philosophy from madness, and philosophy from itself, but that philosophy following the advent of the critical enterprise philosophy becomes auto-vampiric; feeding on itself to support the academy. Following Francois Laruelle’s non-philosophical indictment of philosophy, we could go one step further and say that philosophy operates on the material of what is philosophizable and not the material of the external world.

Teju Cole in New Inquiry:

We are not mayflies. We have known afternoons, and we live day after day for a great many days. This long experience of how days turn—how afternoon becomes late afternoon and late afternoon becomes night—informs any photographic work we do with natural light. The time of day at which the light is at its most glorious photographers call the golden hour: you’ve seen them toting cameras on street corners and in abandoned lots, coming at 5.30 pm or 6.30 or later, depending on the latitude and time of year. They wait for a certain intensity of shadow, for the yellow sunlight to spill just so, before it dies away into the night. But Gueorgui Pinkhassov (Russian, b. 1952, based in Paris) has done something more than wait: he has detected the golden hour in unexpected hours. A low and fractured light shimmers across his ouevre. A fluency in the language of the light at rest in all things, at rest and invisible to most eyes.

Pinkhassov’s work has come to the world in the usual way: photojournalism, print magazines, exhibitions, a book (Sightwalk, about Tokyo), and awards. He is a member of Magnum. On his art he is elusive and insightful: “The power of our Muse lies in her meaninglessness. Even the style can turn one into a slave if one does not run away from it, and then one is doomed to repeat oneself.” Thus: he changes. New approaches, new subjects, new equipment; but always rescuing the small light in things.

The work approaches abstraction. There are Soviet precedents: the spiritual energy of Tarkovsky, for whose filmStalker he shot stills in 1979; the color of Savelev, intense and pained (Goethe: “colors are the deeds and sufferings of light”); the deranged perspective of Rodchenko. Walker Evans and Friedlander too, probably, in the deadpan patterning, and Leiter, in the playing off of painterly color against shallow depths of field. But he wouldn’t be interesting if he weren’t his own man; he is, and he is. And now, in addition to his “serious” work, he is posting photos on Instagram. Instagram? I hesitate.

Keith Meatto in The Millions:

In the fifth episode of the hit sitcom New Girl, a self-styled stud tries to impress an Indian-American woman by declaring that he loves India. When pressed for details, he stumbles his way through the following catalogue:

I love Slumdog. I love naan. I love pepper. I love Ben Kingsley, the stories of Rudyard Kipling. I have respect for cows, of course. I love the Taj Mahal, Deepak Chopra, anyone named Patel. I love monsoons. I love cobras in baskets…I love mango chutney, really, any type of chutney.

The point is clear: the average American’s knowledge of Indian culture is superficial, stereotypical, and offensive. Nevertheless, the mere existence of the joke — and an Indian-American woman in a leading role on primetime TV — confirms how much Indian culture has permeated American pop culture. This should not be surprising: With a population that increased to 2.8 million from 1.7 million between 2000 and 2010, Indians are one of the fastest growing ethnic groups in America. They may also be one of the fastest growing ethnic groups in literary fiction — in America and the larger Anglophone world.

Fiction written in English by authors of Indian descent has been critically acclaimed and commercially successful for decades. Now a new wave of talent has arrived: In 2012, the Indian-American writers Rajesh Parameswaran and Tania Jamespublished their debut short story collections — I Am An Executioner: Love Stories and Aerogrammes, respectively — while British-Indian author Hari Kunzrupublished his fourth novel, Gods Without Men: While it may be too soon for these authors to have achieved the heavyweight status of a Salman Rushdie or Jhumpa Lahiri, their imaginative, provocative, and well-crafted books suggest the continuation of a literary legacy and a move into “post-post-colonial,” “post-ethnic” territory.

Lewis Lapham at Al Jazeera:

The ritual performance of the legend of democracy in the autumn of 2012 promises the conspicuous consumption of $5.8 billion, enough money, thank God, to prove that our flag is still there. Forbidden the use of words apt to depress a Q Score or disturb a Gallup poll, the candidates stand as product placements meant to be seen instead of heard, their quality to be inferred from the cost of their manufacture. The sponsors of the event, generous to a fault but careful to remain anonymous, dress it up with the bursting in air of star-spangled photo ops, abundant assortments of multiflavoured sound bites, and the candidates so well-contrived that they can be played for jokes, presented as game-show contestants, or posed as noble knights-at-arms setting forth on vision quests, enduring the trials by klieg light, until on election night they come to judgment before the throne of cameras by whom and for whom they were produced.

Best of all, at least from the point of view of the commercial oligarchy paying for both the politicians and the press coverage, the issue is never about the why of who owes what to whom, only about the how much and when, or if, the check is in the mail. No loose talk about what is meant by the word democracy or in what ways it refers to the cherished hope of liberty embodied in the history of a courageous people.

The campaigns don't favour the voters with the gratitude and respect owed to their standing as valuable citizens participant in the making of such a thing as a common good. They stay on message with their parsing of democracy as the ancient Greek name for the American Express card, picturing the great, good American place as a Florida resort hotel wherein all present receive the privileges and comforts owed to their status as valued customers, invited to convert the practice of citizenship into the art of shopping, to select wisely from the campaign advertisements, texting A for Yes, B for No.

More here.

Rose Eveleth in Smithsonian Magazine:

Earlier this year, someone took 3D printing to the logical, if extreme, next step: weapons. The 3D printing gun idea has taken off, but Stratasys, the company that makes the printers being used, isn’t exactly happy about it. They want their printers back.

A few months ago, on a gun forum, someone with the username HaveBlue posted pictures of an AR lower that he printed using a Stratasys 3D printer. Eventually he assembled a .22 caliber pistol using that lower. Not only did he print it, he shot it. And it worked. He writes, “No, it did not blow up into a bazillion tiny plastic shards and maim me for life – I am sorry to have disappointed those of you who foretold doom and gloom.”

The plans for that lower are freely available online, and a few months later Cody Wilson, a law student at the University of Texas, formed a group “Defense Distributed” and planned to launch a “Wiki Weapon Project.” The premise was to come up with a design that anyone could download and print. They tried to raise money on IndiGogo, a site for crowd-sourced funding, but the site quickly shut them down and returned the money to their supporters.

But the project has still gained a lot of money from investors.

More here.

Alexander Reed Kelly in TruthDig:

A bold experiment is under way in the world’s fifth-largest economy: As part of a recovery plan aimed at plugging a $48 billion hole in the French budget, leftist President Francois Hollandeannounced last week a 75 percent tax on the personal incomes of anyone earning more than $1.3 million a year, effective for two years beginning in 2013.

The decision has some of the country’s top earners, led in the media by cosmetics tycoon Jean-Paul Agon, suggesting that the new rules will make France inhospitable to commerce, and implying that the impending blow to their bank accounts may compel executives to take their moneymaking activities elsewhere.

“If there is such a new tax rule,” the L’Oreal CEO said in an interview before the figure was confirmed Friday, “it’s going to be very, very difficult to attract talent to work in France, almost impossible.”

Agon’s warning reflects an attitude among the rich that is older than capitalism itself. If you tax us too much, the thinking goes, then the cost of providing the goods and services society requires will become too high. We won’t be able to pay the wages our workers deserve, and our talents for enterprise will find more favorable conditions elsewhere.

More here.

Contemplating the tomb of John Keats for the readers of Irish Monthly, Oscar Wilde swooningly lamented ‘this divine boy’ who was ‘a Priest of Beauty slain before his time’. Critics haven’t spoken that way for a long time, and that’s no bad thing; but Wilde’s sense of a poet doomed and lovely, an aesthetic spirit too good for this life, would prove tenacious despite the changing idioms of the age. Paul de Man, for instance, a high-octane theorist who couldn’t sound less like Wilde, once confidently asserted that when reading Keats ‘we are reading the work of a man whose experience is mainly literary’, a man whose life had been chiefly led within the pure mental spaces of art. Wilde did not invent this legend. Much of its popularity must stem from the early and memorable things said by Shelley, who rapturously elegised an otherworldly spirit in Adonais, and by Byron, who entrenched the myth of vulnerable genius in Don Juan even while he was sending it up: ”Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle,/Should let itself be snuff’d out by an article.’

more from Seamus Perry at Literary Review here.

Eric Hobsbawm was one of the greatest historians produced by the twentieth century. Easily. You could slice off any five of the books from his C.V. and he would still be in the running. A thinker of dazzling scope and dizzying erudition, Hobsbawm had few peers and many emulators. He specialized in the nineteenth century but remains a giant in scholarly debates ranging from the seventeenth century to the twentieth. Historians at their most ambitious, he believed, could aspire to explaining “how and why Homo sapiens got from the paleolithic to the nuclear era.” Nobody can claim with even a tattered shred of intellectual honesty the competence to fulfill this project, but Hobsbawm came as close to meeting the challenge as any of us Homo sapiens is likely to. No surprise, then, that his death has precipitated a torrent of deserved tributes, from admirers on the cartoonish Right to comrades on the left, with stops at seemingly every position in between. Celebrations of his intellectual achievements vie with accounts of personal kindness for the admiration of readers. But the rush to memorialize, though understandable, is a poor commemoration for someone whose work at its best was defined by skepticism of dogma and repudiation of sentimentality.

more from Timothy Shenk at Dissent here.

T. S. Eliot famously proposed that a poem is no less than a “raid on the inarticulate,” an effort to make what has not yet been said pass into speech. But Strand’s objective is somewhat different, even counter to that. He aims to engage with the inarticulate, to approach it, moving outside of the visible in order, ideally, to inhabit that unknown space. He suggests that the work of the poem could be to bear witness to that which cannot be articulated, even as it calls to us. This effort affords us no end of trouble, however, since poetry is indivisible from its articulation. If the poem is trying to get at nothing, it is always using a something in order to do so. “The Minister of Culture” makes this trouble evident. “Nothing is elsewhere doing what nothing does,” but that expansion of the dark can never occur here: the light of the mind keeps it at a distance. The personification of nothingness in the last sentences also complicates the pursuit of oblivion: nothing becomes a love-object, and therefore loses its insubstantiality.

more from Jay Deshpande at Boston Review here.

I Invent You

I invent you in the garden
I invent that you talk to me
that you call me
and in fact you do talk to me
and sometimes I don't understand
what you say
and I am amazed at you
at your mystery
and I pretend that I understand
so that you won't go away.
Day after day I invent you
and that's my way
of confronting your absence
because if I don't invent you
the joy of my hours
would vanish
and you as well.

by Claribel Alegría
from Sorrow
translation Carolyn Forché
Curbstone Press, 1999

Original Spanish after the jump

Read more »

From Slate: