But this “room with a view” is also metaphorical. The Mediterranean, as imagined by the North, is where you expect to “open a window” to erotic, tactile or – most crudely – alcoholic liberation. For several generations, the Mediterranean was rather like what Polynesia was to Gauguin: a place where people walked about unclothed and uninhibited, where all you needed to be happy was the sun and a handful of figs, a place where physical liberation met philosophy, ancient wisdom and civilization. This is the Mediterranean of Salvatore’s film Mediterraneo, a Greek island that resists even the war being waged around it. It is the Mediterranean of Renato Baretic’s novel Osmi povjerenik (“The eighth commissioner”) – an isolated island where a strange dialect is spoken, where the locals refuse to recognise any external authority, and where the protagonist finds refuge from the rebarbative reality of a corrupt and cynical Croatia in transition. It is the Mediterranean of Alexander Sacher Masoch’s Die Ölgärten brennen (“The olive groves are burning”): the beautiful island of Korcula (another island!), where the longevity of the olive grove and the wisdom of the ordinary man defeats Nazi evil. This is the Mediterranean sought, though frequently not found, by the heroes of great European literature and film.

more from Jurica Pavicic at Eurozine here.

Like Someone in Love has all of Kiarostami’s usual preoccupations: the passage of time, the mystery and contingency of human intercourse, the shadow of death, the illusions of love, the intimacy of being isolated from the world in a moving vehicle. But the setting in Japan does not feel arbitrary; it has a point. Tokyo, the ultimate modern metropolis, with its neon-lit commercial graffiti and buildings that look like a pastiche of everywhere and nowhere, is perfect for Kiarostami’s story of closeness between strangers. To most foreign visitors, Tokyo looks uncannily familiar and yet deeply strange. Kiarostami is a stranger in Tokyo, but his depiction of the city is extraordinarily intimate and delicate. Kiarostami’s idea for the film began with an image. Driving in a taxi through the raffish entertainment district of Roppongi, he filmed an elderly lady standing on a street corner.

more from Ian Buruma at the NYRB here.

Gad Saad in Psychology Today:

This past weekend, a prominent consumer scholar took me to task onFacebook regarding evolutionary psychology. He seemed to reject the idea that men and women might exhibit biological-based sex differences, as this is apparently a form of biological determinism that promotes racial and gender stereotyping. I am reproducing here my two Facebook replies to him (with very slight editing). The first quote refers to his rejection of so-called “gender essences” (i.e., that innate biological-based differences might exist between the sexes) while the second speaks to his lumping of evolutionary psychology with biological determinism.

“Homo sapiens is a sexually dimorphic species (a basic tenet of evolutionary biology). As such, we should expect that on many dimensions, men and women will exhibit no sex differences. On others, there will be differences in one direction or the other. The meta-framework that explains these patterns is evolutionary theory. It has nothing to do with the '50s [in reference to his implying that “gender essences” is a form of obsolete sexist thinking of the '50s] and everything to do with an astonishing amount of empirical evidence collected for well over 150 years (let alone archival, paleontological, historical, anthropological, ethological data etc. collected over millennia and spanning endless cultures).”

“Biological determinism is a canard that has repeatedly been explained away by evolutionary informed scientists since time immemorial. Humans are an inextricable mix of their genes and their environments. As a matter of fact, genes get turned on or off as a function of environmental inputs. Evolutionary-based cognitive computational systems take information from the environment to get activated. Natural selection itself, the foundational mechanism of evolution, is shaped by the selective forces within a specific environment. Hence, there is no such thing as biological determinism. It only exists in the minds of those who wish to hang on to the antiquated and erroneous idea that the human mind starts off as a blank slate. Biological determinism = unicorn. They both do not exist. That many cretins have misused biological-based theories for a wide range of nefarious political goals says nothing about the veracity of evolutionary theory whether applied to mosquitoes or humans. Evolution is the sole game in town to explain the evolution of biological diversity on earth. No working biologist questions its veracity. It is largely becoming untenable for social scientists to reject the import of evolution in explaining human affairs. Culture is crucially important but so is biology.”

More here.

Richard Feynman at the Museum of Hoaxes website:

There were quite a few wires running from the engine down to where Mr. Papp and the spectators were standing, into a set of instruments used for measurement; these included a variac, a variable transformer with a dial which could put out different voltages. The instruments were, in turn, connected by a cord to an electrical outlet in the side of the building. So it was pretty obvious where the power supply was.

The engine started to go around, and there was a bit of disappointment: the propeller of the fan went around quietly without the noise of an ordinary engine with powerful explosions in the cylinders, and everything- it looked very much like an electric motor.

Mr. Papp pulled the plug from the wall, and the fan propeller continued to turn. 'You see, this cord has nothing to do with the engine; it's only supplying power to the instruments,' he said. Well, that was easy. He's got a storage battery inside the engine. 'Do you mind if I hold the plug?' I asked? 'Not at all,' replied Mr. Papp, and he handed it to me.

It wasn't very long before he asked me to give me back the plug. 'I'd like to hold it a little longer,' I said, figuring that if I stalled around enough, the damn thing would stop.

Pretty soon Mr. Papp was frantic, so I (Richard Feynman) gave him back the plug and he plugged it back into the wall. A few moments later there was a big explosion:

A cone of silvery uniform stuff shot out and turned to smoke. The ruined engine fell over on its side. The man standing next to me said, 'I've been hit!' I looked at him, the whole side of his arm was torn open, you could see all the muscle fibers, tendons-everything.

More here. [Thanks to Sean Carroll.]

From Nature:

Sky-high blood glucose levels, a diet loaded with salt and a tendency to pack away fat sounds like a recipe for a health disaster in a human. But in a Bactrian camel, these are adaptations that may help it survive in some of the driest, coldest and highest regions of the world. Researchers in Mongolia and China have begun to unravel the genomic peculiarities behind the physiological tricks that camels use to survive in the harshest of conditions. In a paper published today in Nature Communications, the scientists describe the draft genomes of wild and domesticated Bactrian camels¹. When they first explore a new genome, geneticists are most interested in the ‘rapidly evolving’ sections. These hot zones of activity typically contain genes that define the species, coding for the characteristics that set it apart from its closest relatives. “We found that many genes related to metabolism are under accelerated evolution in the camel, compared with other even-toed ungulates such as cattle,” says Yixue Li, director of the Shanghai Center for Bioinformation Technology in China and a co-author of the paper.

…The work shows that camels can withstand massive blood glucose levels owing in part to changes in genes that are linked to type II diabetes in humans. The Bactrians' rapidly evolving genes include some that regulate insulin signalling pathways, the authors explain. A closer study of how camels respond to insulin may help to unravel how insulin regulation and diabetes work in humans. “I’m very interested in the glucose story,” says Brian Dalrymple, a computational biologist at the Queensland Bioscience Precinct in Brisbane, Australia.

More here.

From Scientific American:

The risk of destroying a career is nothing compared with the evolutionary drive to reproduce

An admitted affair has crumbled the career of CIA Director David Petraeus, prompting the evergreen question: Why do people with so much to lose risk it all for sex? In the last few years alone, several public figures, from former Rep. Anthony Weiner to action star and former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, have admitted to straying from their marital vows. In Petraeus' case, a miscalculation of risk may have contributed to the decision to cheat, psychologists say. “People tend to underestimate how quickly small risks mount up” because of repeated exposure to those risks, said Baruch Fischhoff, a professor of social and decision science at Carnegie Mellon University. “You do something once and you get away with it — certain things you're probably going to get away with — but you keep doing them often enough, eventually the risk gets pretty high.” Even so, men can become blind to risk at the sight of an attractive woman, and from an evolutionary perspective, cheating can be a positive mechanism for ensuring gene survival, regardless of risk, scientists say.

More here.

Bereft

Where had I heard this wind before
Change like this to a deeper roar?
What would it take my standing there for,
Holding open a restive door,
Looking down hill to a frothy shore?
Summer was past and the day was past.
Sombre clouds in the west were massed.
Out on the porch's sagging floor,
Leaves got up in a coil and hissed,
Blindly struck at my knee and missed.
Something sinister in the tone
Told me my secret must be known:
Word I was in the house alone
Somehow must have gotten abroad,
Word I was in my life alone,
Word I had no one left but God.

Robert Frost

Slavoj Žižek in The Guardian:

So should we write Obama off? Is he nothing more than Bush with a human face? There are signs which point beyond this pessimistic vision. Although his healthcare reforms were mired in so many compromises they amounted to almost nothing, the debate triggered was of huge importance. A great art of politics is to insist on a particular demand that, while thoroughly realist, feasible and legitimate, disturbs the core of the hegemonic ideology…

In Europe, the ground floor of a building is counted as zero, so the floor above it is the first floor, while in the US, the first floor is on street level. This trivial difference indicates a profound ideological gap: Europeans are aware that, before counting starts – before decisions or choices are made – there has to be a ground of tradition, a zero level that is always already given and, as such, cannot be counted. While the US, a land with no proper historical tradition, presumes that one can begin directly with self-legislated freedom – the past is erased. What the US has to learn to take into account is the foundation of the “freedom to choose”.

Obama is often accused of dividing the American people instead of bringing them together to find bipartisan solutions – but what if this is what is good about him? In situations of crisis, a division is urgently needed between those who want to drag on within old parameters and those who are aware of necessary change. Such a division, not opportunistic compromises, is the only path to true unity. When Margaret Thatcher was asked about her greatest achievement, she promptly answered: “New Labour.” And she was right: her triumph was that even her political enemies adopted her basic economic policies. True victory over your enemy occurs when they start to use your language, so that your ideas form the foundation of the entire field.

Max Read at Gawker:

Since CIA director David Petraeus resigned on Friday over an extramarital affair uncovered by the FBI, the story has shifted from John Le Carré espionage novel to Vince Flynn right-wing thriller to misanthropic Coen Brothers farce — adding along the way more characters, more improbable situations, and best of all, more sexually-charged emails.

But how can you keep track of it, between the five main characters in this metaphorically-appropriate Love Pentagon and the many minor characters besides? You come here, where in-house illustrator Jim Cooke has created this attractive and easy-to-follow flow-chart, a key to which is provided below.

More here.

Derrida wanted not only to liberate writing from the ‘repression’ of speech, but to demonstrate that speech itself was a form of writing, a way of referring to things that aren’t there. If logocentrism was a ‘metaphysics of presence’, what he proposed was a poetics of absence – a philosophical echo of Mallarmé’s remark that what defines ‘rose’ as a word is ‘l’absence de toute rose’. Derrida, a passionate reader of Mallarmé, made a similar argument about language by drawing on – and radicalising – Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics. Saussure had argued that words acquire their meaning through their difference from other words – specifically from the differences between phonemes – rather than from their referents. Derrida went a step further, arguing that meaning itself is subject to what he deliberately misspelled as différance, a pun on the verb différer, which means both ‘to differ’ and ‘to defer’. (He spelled différance with an ‘a’ rather than an ‘e’ because it could only be read, not heard: a mark of the primacy of writing over speech.) The meaning of what we say, or write (a distinction without a difference, for Derrida), is always ‘undecidable’; it hardly takes shape before it dissolves again in an endless process of differing and deferring.

more from Adam Shatz at the LRB here.

Alison Flood in The Guardian:

Fifteen years after Salman Rushdie called John le Carré a “pompous ass” and Le Carré responded with an accusation of “self-canonisation”, one of the most gloriously vituperative literary feuds of recent times has come to an end.

Last month, Rushdie told an audience at the Cheltenham literature festival that he “really” admired Le Carré as a writer. “I wish we hadn't done it,” he said of the 15-year-old feud which played out in the letters pages of the Guardian in 1997. “I think of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy as one of the great novels of postwar Britain.”

Now Le Carré has also extended an olive branch. “I too regret the dispute,” he told the Times. The fight had its roots in Le Carré's criticism of The Satanic Verses: “My position was that there is no law in life or nature that says great religions may be insulted with impunity,” said Le Carré. When Le Carré was later accused of antisemitism, Rushdie wrote to the Guardian expressing his lack of sympathy. Le Carré responded, saying Rushdie's “way with the truth is as self-serving as ever”; Rushdie called Le Carré a “pompous ass”; and then Christopher Hitchens waded in, taking Rushdie's side and saying: “John le Carré's conduct in your pages is like nothing so much as that of a man who, having relieved himself in his own hat, makes haste to clamp the brimming chapeau on his head.”

Rushdie was then accused of “self-canonisation” by Le Carré, but the Satanic Verses author had the last word. “I did call him a pompous ass, which I thought pretty mild in the circumstances. 'Ignorant' and 'semi-literate' are dunces' caps he has skilfully fitted on his own head. I wouldn't dream of removing them,” he wrote.

More here.

Walter Kirn in the New York Times:

Six years ago, with his rambunctious debut novel, “Dr. Pitcher’s Experimental Mistress,” the chronicle of a timid Iowa chiropractor’s Ambien-fueled erotic awakening aboard a sinking Alaskan cruise ship, Samson Graham-Muñoz, then just 23 years old, gained an instant reputation as a limber verbal gymnast. Told in the form of a blog-within-a-blog, written by the eponymous physician in a blurred state of somnambulant arousal (the doctor types notes on his iPad during sex), the book gained a small but zealous following among fans of droll divertissements. Still, there were some critics, including this one, who found the performance more impish than inspired. Graham-Muñoz was clearly a talent on a tear, but where exactly he was headed was anybody’s guess.

The question now is why we ever doubted him. “The String Theory Quartet,” his sophomore effort, is no less audacious than its predecessor. But this time the pyrotechnics are imbued with a wounded humanity, like firecrackers that go “ouch” instead of “pop” or Roman candles that sigh as they shoot off sparks. Graham-Muñoz the antic boy wonder has matured, enriching the cerebral with the intestinal. His smart, soulful writing lodges in the gut, delivering resonant artistic thrills that even casual readers will find accessible.

The book of the moment? To be sure. A book for the ages? It’s too soon to say. But it isn’t too soon to say, loudly, in public, with arms raised high: The literary times they are a-changin’ and “The String Theory Quartet” is why.

More here.

Jason Zengerle in NY Magazine:

Four years ago, in the fading light of a chilly December afternoon, Jesse Louis Jackson Jr. arrived at a Chicago office building for the most important meeting of his political life. As the eldest son of the Reverend Jesse L. Jackson, Jesse Jr. was no stranger to high-powered summitry. When Jackson was an infant, Martin Luther King Jr. paid visits to his family’s tiny apartment; as a teenager, he accompanied his father to meet with presidents in the Oval Office; by the time he was a young man, and a key adviser to “Reverend” (as he often addressed his father), he was traveling the globe for encounters with Fidel Castro and Nelson Mandela. Now, as the representative for Illinois’s Second Congressional District, Jackson was a political player in his own right—someone whose time was in demand by any number of powerful people, including Barack Obama, who’d tapped Jackson as a co-chair for both his 2004 Senate bid and his just-concluded presidential campaign.

The man with whom Jackson was meeting that afternoon was not a world-historical figure. Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich was under federal investigation for corruption, and a recent poll had put his approval rating at 13 percent. And yet, as far as Jackson was concerned, Blagojevich was a political titan. It was his job to appoint the person who would fill Obama’s Senate seat—an appointment Jackson desperately coveted. Although he was just 43 years old, he had already spent thirteen years in Congress and was itching to move on to bigger things. “I grew up wanting to be just like Dad,” Jackson once said. “Dad wanted to be president.” He’d flirted with runs for U.S. senator and Chicago mayor as possible stepping-stones and was determined not to lose this opportunity. “He’d watched all these people whom he had helped pass him by, especially Barack,” Delmarie Cobb, a Chicago political consultant and a former Jackson adviser, says. “And he was like, ‘Wait a minute, I’ve got to do something!’”

It Cannot Stay

I was once told the gold in life can not stay
That just like the harvest moon, it can not stay

That while night shall always give birth to day
We should not dream of light, it can not stay

Rage, Rage against the dying of the light, the old sages say
But why battle against fate, even it can not stay

And we abhor the moon and what in darkness may lay
But our fears will leave soon, it can not stay

We hope and pray for heroes to keep our nightmares at bay
But even heroes die, they can not stay

And you, Little Bear, whose pains are all that light the way
Even Bears have faltering strength, but the sputter can not stay

by Nick Yuknalis

From New Statesman:

Henry James once defined criticism as the mind “reaching out for the reasons of its interest”, a process that he deemed “the very education of our imaginative life”. Michael Gorra doesn’t include this quotation in Portrait of a Novel but it is an apt description of the book he has written about James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1881). For many readers, Portrait is the greatest of James’s many masterpieces. It was indisputably the pivot on which his fiction turned toward the problem that would absorb him for the rest of his life, the problem of consciousness. It is the novel that defined psychological interiority as drama, forever changing our ideas about what fiction can do. In particular, its famous 42nd chapter, in which Isabel Archer discovers that instead of “affronting her destiny”, as she hoped, her destiny has affronted her, must, as Gorra argues, stand “as one of James’s greatest achievements and a turning point in the history of the novel”.

I expect that mine will prove a minority perspective on Gorra’s marvellous portrait of Portrait, for I read it while in the final stages of revising my own book about the genesis of an American masterpiece, in my case F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Unearthing the roots of a classic novel is a (comparatively) novel way for the critic to reach out for the reasons of our own interests, to explore the education of our imaginative life. For Gorra, it provides an opportunity to reframe The Portrait of a Lady against the background of James’s life and art, his ideas about consciousness, desire and autonomy and his role in the invention of American literature. Like Gorra, I am also drawing on biography, correspondence, history and literary criticism to discover the origins of great fiction.

More here.

Natalie Angier in The New York Times:

In the wake of Hurricane Sandy and the spiteful me-too northeaster, much of the East Coast looked so battered and flooded, so strewed with toppled trees and stripped of dunes and beaches, that many observers feared the worst. Any day now, surely, the wildlife corpses would start showing up — especially birds, for who likelier to pay when a sky turns rogue than the ones who act as if they own it? Yet biologists studying the hurricane’s aftermath say there is remarkably little evidence that birds, or any other countable, charismatic fauna for that matter, have suffered the sort of mass casualties seen in environmental disasters like the BP oil spill of 2010, when thousands of oil-slicked seabirds washed ashore, unable to fly, feed or stay warm. “With an oil spill, the mortality is way more direct and evident,” said Andrew Farnsworth, a scientist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. “And though it’s possible that thousands of birds were slammed into the ocean by this storm and we’ll never know about it, my gut tells me that didn’t happen.”

To the contrary, scientists said, powerful new satellite tracking studies of birds on the wing — including one that coincided with the height of Hurricane Sandy’s fury — reveal birds as the supreme masters of extreme weather management, able to skirt deftly around gale-force winds, correct course after being blown horribly astray, or even use a hurricane as a kind of slingshot to propel themselves forward at hyperspeed.

More here.