David L. Ulin at the LA Times:

“Why is walking so full of woe?” Werner Herzog asks early in “Of Walking in Ice: Munich-Paris, 23 November – 14 December 1974” (University of Minnesota Press: 128 pp., $19.95 paper), a diary of sorts describing a 600-mile trek through winter that he undertook 40 years ago.

If this sounds quintessentially Herzog, quintessentially quixotic, so be it; in his films — most notably, perhaps, the hallucinatory “Fitzcarraldo” and “Aguirre, the Wrath of God” — he traces the price, and power, of obsession to both ennoble and dismantle us. Something similar is at work in this slender book, originally published in 1978 and newly restored to print.

The inspiration for the project is a phone call Herzog received in late 1974, informing him that a friend, the German film historian Lotte Eisner, was close to death in a Paris hospital. As an act of expiation, then, or maybe magic, Herzog decided to walk from Munich to Eisner’s bedside, as if, through such his relentless movement, he might keep her alive.

more here.

Stephen Cave at the Financial Times:

In Does Altruism Exist? Culture, Genes, and the Welfare of Others, David Sloan Wilson sets out the evolutionary story. How we might have evolved to be self-sacrificing has long been a challenge for Darwinism — after all, those who give their lives to save their community do not pass on their genes. Even less extreme kindnesses such as sharing food with a sick friend could put someone at a disadvantage in the ruthless race to be the fittest.

Various theories have been put forward to solve this puzzle. Wilson, professor of biology and anthropology at the Binghamton University in New York State, has long been an advocate of one in particular called group selection. He claims that this view has now won out; a claim with which many biologists would disagree. But in this short and punchy book, he does an excellent job of explaining the relationship between the different theories and the now substantial evidence that we have indeed evolved to do each other good turns.

The essence of group selection is this: “although a high standard of morality gives but a slight or no advantage to each individual man and his children over other men of the same tribe . . . an increase in the number of well-endowed men and an advancement in the standard of morality will certainly give an immense advantage to one tribe over another. A tribe including many members who, from possessing a high degree of the spirit of patriotism, fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy were always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice themselves for the common good, would be victorious over most other tribes, and this would be natural selection.”

more here.

Markus Lust in Vice:

An Austrian gay mag called Vangardist made headlines around the world this week for using the blood of three HIV-positive people to print its new issue. The sterilized blood carrying the virus was used on 3,000 of 18,000 copies, and was intended to address the stigmatization many people living with HIV deal with on a daily basis. The issue is of course completely safe to handle, and researchers from Harvard and Austria's Innsbruck University provided guidance to the magazine throughout the process. The issue deals with the history behind the stigmatization of HIV patients, the state of the disease today, and contains interviews with each of the donors. Proceeds from the issue's sales will be donated to HIV and AIDS charities. I got in touch with Vangardist's publisher, Julian Wiehl, to talk about the campaign, Conchita Wurst, and his HIV Heroes initiative.

VICE: What did you hope to achieve with the current issue of Vangardist? Julian Wiehl: We wanted to raise awareness for HIV—but also point out that people who carry the virus are still extremely stigmatized in our society. The problem is not that HIV never hit the headlines. The problem is that HIV doesn't make headlines any longer. Everybody seems to think we've heard enough about it. But the reaction to our print magazine shows that there's obviously still lots of work to do. Unfortunately, reporting on the topic in a matter-of-fact way is not enough

More here.

Life is two things— what you get
and what you do with what you get
…………………. —Roshi Bob

Foxtrot

In five days Raul will die from falling
On a knife blade held in the fist of
An acquaintance.
His good friend Paulo will hold him
In his arms and cradle his
Shaved head,
While Raul's eyes express surprise
At the possibility—no, it is
The impending reality—yes, that life
Is quickly leaving his body.
And Raul's mind must race
To keep up with his soul's
Unscheduled departure.

But that will be five days hence. Right now,
Raul and Paulo and the rest of their crew
Are slogging through the crowded mall,
Adjusting loose waistbands, step step;
Shifting Sox headgear, three four;
Dragging trains of Nike laces
Among the threads of frayed pant legs,
As passers-by shift and pivot around them
One, two, onetwothree.
.

Gary Witt
from 10×3 plus, #7

Anne Enright in The New York Times:

Every year on Mother’s Day the lists appear: Bad Mothers in Fiction, Monstrous Mothers in Literature, 10 Worst Mothers in Books We Love. There are a few Most Wonderful lists, but these mothers are not from books generally recognized as great or enduring works. The two most famous are Caroline Ingalls in “Little House on the Prairie” and Marmee in “Little Women” — it’s a bonnet thing perhaps, though a good straw poke does not save Mrs. Bennet in “Pride and Prejudice” from the charge of foolishness. This makes you a bad mother too, apparently. Perhaps there should be an exam. Who could pass it? To be ordinary in any way — weak, fallible, occasionally drunk or desiring, all of these make you a liability to your fictional children’s fictional well- being. Thank goodness reality is not like that.

It’s a given that adulterous women make poor mothers; this is both sin and punishment for Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina, who lose not just their children, but their proper maternal instinct. First, and perhaps forgivably, they fall out of love with their husbands, but this leads them, somehow, to fall out of love with their own progeny. The perversion of the natural order becomes horribly perfect in Waugh’s “A Handful of Dust,” when Brenda Last blurts “Thank God” when she hears her son has died, and not, as she had supposed, her lover of the same name. When desire is in the air, motherhood becomes problematic. This despite the fact that sex causes motherhood. It is a fact worth stating sometimes that sex, in itself, cannot turn you into a whore, no matter what the nuns told you then or pornography tells you now, but it really can turn you into a mother. After which, of course, you are never allowed to have sex again.

More here.

Alvin Powell in the Harvard Gazette:

Professor Kevin “Kit” Parker set 16 students in his “Engineering Sciences 96” class to a real-world test of teamwork, technical skill, and dedication this semester, assigning them the 14-week task of building a better barbecue smoker.

Along the way, they had to decode the arcane process of smoking meat, applying science to a traditional Southern art form with the aim of simplifying it for the novice and updating it for the 21st century. They had a real-world client in Williams-Sonoma, the company that sponsored their efforts; real-world competition in their experimental control, a high-end smoker called the “Big Green Egg”; and the real world itself to contend with, in the form of snowstorms and subzero temperatures for their Saturday smoking sessions.

“I was eating it last night as it came off the smoker, and it was fantastic,” said Patrick Connolly, Williams-Sonoma executive vice president and chief marketing officer, who was at an end-of-semester barbecue Monday where the culinary results were presented.

Connolly was among several dozen guests, students, faculty, and staff at the barbecue, held just outside Harvard’s Maxwell-Dworkin building. The barbecue followed an hour-long student presentation of the scientific results of the project in nearby Pierce Hall.

More here.

Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

The highway from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, Highway 1, looks like any other highway in the world. This fact alone is disconcerting. The road to Jerusalem should be special. Somewhere deep down I suppose I wanted it to be a dirt road, a cobblestone road, anything but a normal highway. I even fantasized that the ascent from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem would not happen by means of a road at all. It would just happen. In reality, it is a highway. A highway filled with too many cars and bastard truck drivers probing the limits of vehicular stability and good sense.

About two thirds of the way up to Jerusalem, however, an interesting and unusual sight does present itself. It is the sight of abandoned vehicles along the side of the road. They aren’t normal vehicles, passenger cars or trucks. The vehicles are painted in the telltale green that only gets slapped on things owned by the military. You don’t get much time to inspect these military vehicles as you drive by on the highway. It is hard to guess their purpose, though it looks like they’ve been there for a while, remnants from something that happened in the first half of the 20th century.

My friend Ori, who was driving me from Ben-Gurion airport outside of Tel Aviv, explained that the vehicles were remnants of the military convoy that broke the Arab siege of Jerusalem during the War of Independence in 1948. The convoy was led by an American general, Mickey Marcus, Ori told me. “We call him the first Israeli general—aluf in Hebrew—since biblical days, since Joshua blowing his trumpet at the walls of Jericho.” The aluf, Ori said, was shot dead in the final days of the campaign. But the convoy made it through to Jerusalem.

For a week or so, while exploring Jerusalem old and new, the sight of those abandoned military vehicles along the road sat unbothered in the back of my brain. Then, I saw them again on a trip back down to Tel Aviv to visit friends. I began to understand what had nagged at me when I saw the vehicles the first time.

Half-destroyed military vehicles do not normally sit alongside a modern highway. These vehicles are monuments to the military struggles that attend the founding of the modern state of Israel. Such monuments might, in another country, come with an acknowledgment. No such luck in Israel.

More here.

Polls for the UK election were all very off. Ben Lauderdale offers some possible reasons in FiveThirtyEight:

The only thing we can say on our behalf is that in comparative terms, our forecast was middle of the pack, as no one had a good pre-election forecast. Of course the national exit poll, while not as close to the target as in 2010, was far better than any pre-election forecast.

Steve Fisher at ElectionsEtc came closest to the seat result: his 95 percent prediction intervals nearly included the Conservative seat total, although they missed the Liberal Democrat interval substantially, just as ours did. Several other forecasts were further away than we were.

The most obvious problem for all forecasters was that the polling average had Labour and the Conservatives even on the night before the election. This was not just the average of the polls, it was the consensus. Nearly every pollster’s final poll placed the two parties within 1 percentage point of each other. Based on the polling average being level, we predicted Conservatives to win by 1.6 percentage points on the basis of the historical tendency of polls to overstate changes from the last election. This kind of adjustment is helpful for understanding how the 2010 result deviated from the national polls on election day, as well as the infamous 1992 U.K. polling disaster, when the polls had the two parties even before the election and the Tories won by 7.5 percentage points. The Conservative margin over Labour will be smaller than that when the 2015 totals are finalized, but not a lot smaller (currently it is 6.4 with all but one constituency declared). So our adjustment was in the right direction, but it was not nearly large enough. Part of the reason Fisher did better is that he applied a similar adjustment, but made it party-specific, leading to a larger swingback for the Tories than for other parties because of that 1992 result.

Before the election, we calculated expectations for three measures of performance — absolute seat error, individual seat error, and Brier score — based on the uncertainty in our forecast. (More about how those three errors are defined can be found in this article.) We have now calculated each of these quantities for our forecasts, given the final results. We did not do as well as we had expected to do by any of these measures. Our absolute seat error was 105 . We incorrectly predicted 63 individual seats (out of 632 in England, Wales and Scotland). Our Brier score was 96 (the best possible score would have been 0, and the worst 632). Not good.

More here.

Richard Seymour in Jacobin (photo Ben Stanstall / AFP):

This is not 1992. In a way, it’s far worse than that. Imagine this: Labour has given the Conservatives their “Portillo moment,” with Ed Ballslosing his seat in Morley and Outwood, not from incumbency but from opposition.

The perspective gets even worse when you look at the figures. Overall, the Tory vote has barely shifted from 36.1% to (on present counts) 36.8%. That is, the Tories have a bit more than a third of the vote, and fractionally more than the total with which they failed to win a parliamentary majority in 2010. This is not, chiefly, a Tory surge. In previous elections, historically, a vote share of this scale would have left the Tories on the opposition benches.

But Labour’s vote also flatlined, currently about 30.6%, compared to 29% in 2010 — which was its worst share of the vote since 1918. In key marginals, like Nuneaton, it barely made a dent. In some relatively safe Tory seats where it should have had a swing, like North Swindon (a safe Tory area since 2010 boundary changes), the Tories actually gained.

National turnout looks like it was about 66%, which is fractionally above the turnout in 2010, and most of that increase will have been in Scotland and certain UKIP hot spots like Thanet South. So, Labour has mobilized almost no one who hadn’t previously voted Labour during its worst election defeat since 1918.

Both Labour and the Conservatives are in the middle of a long-term crisis, neither has done anything to reverse that, and the question in this election was: whose crisis is worse?

More here. Also see here in Vox.

Simon Callow at The Spectator:

Orson Welles would have been 100 this month. When he died in 1985, aged 70, the wonder was that he had lasted so long. His bulk was so immense, his productivity so prodigious in so many areas, his temperament so exorbitant, that he seemed to have been part of the landscape for ever. Never was ruined greatness so visible. The other great auteurs maudits of this century, Abel Gance and D.W. Griffith, disappeared into silence and oblivion. Eisenstein simply died young. Not Welles. Every time he trundled insincerely through some commercial for cheap liquor (he, the great bon viveur; he, for whom the very word commercial was an insult when applied to film), he sent a pang through the world’s heart.

Pity, for the man who made Citizen Kane, three other masterpieces including the peerless Chimes at Midnight, and at least two lesser but exquisite short films? Pity, for the man who revolutionised radio, whose theatre productions have never been rivalled for audacity and innovation, whose acting performances in the few good films he made for other directors (The Third Man, Compulsion) will never be forgotten? Yes, pity for what might have been: the very thing that haunted Welles himself. ‘Considering what I thought of myself at 14, I’m a mess,’ he admitted. ‘I started at the top,’ he famously said, ‘and worked my way downwards.’

more here.

Robert T. Tally Jr. at the LA Review of Books:

Admittedly, I come to this as a notorious Orc-sympathizer, but I cannot bring myself to trust Galadriel, as well as the elves more generally. In my view, Galadriel has a rather ambiguous moral character. She is benevolent, to be sure, but her sense of good and evil rests on a dubious foundation, inasmuch as she perceives change itself as undesirable. For those beings who are not entirely satisfied with the status quo, Galadriel’s intentions may not be so noble, and her powers may well seem like forms of dark magic.

In my “Song of Saruman” essay, I suggested that the traitorous White Wizard was really an inverted Galadriel. When she refuses to take up the One Ring, she “passed the test,” whereas Saruman’s desire for power — even if it was for the power to do good — led him to become a Sauron-like villain. But lest we chalk up Galadriel’s noble choice to some inherent beatitude, thus denying how powerful the temptation really was and in turn robbing her of the truly heroic aspect of her refusal, we ought to remember that Galadriel is far more like Saruman, or even Sauron, than most Tolkien enthusiasts care to believe.

As we learn from her fascinating backstory, Galadriel came to Middle-earth as an unrepentant imperialist.

more here.

Dan Chiasson at The New Yorker:

Hayes is forty-three and lives in Pittsburgh, where he is a professor of English at Carnegie Mellon. In 2010, his volume “Lighthead” won a National Book Award, and last year he received a MacArthur “genius” grant. He played basketball for Coker College, in South Carolina, where he was an Academic All-American, but he has the bounding imagination of someone fortified and defended, for years, by shyness. If you judge a poem by how big a chunk of reality it smuggles into language before returning it, transformed, you will have a hard time beating this catalogue from “Wigphrastic”:

Nonslip polyurethane patches, superfine lace,

Isis wigs, Cleopatra wigs, Big Booty Judy wigs

under the soft radar-streaked music of Klymaxx

singing, “The men all pause when I walked into the room.”

An ekphrastic poem is one that describes a work of art; “Wigphrastic” describes Ellen Gallagher’s “DeLuxe,” a portfolio of sixty works on paper that depict, among other things, vintage ads for hair straighteners and skin whiteners.

more here.

Canto 28 of the Inferno

I saw it, I’m sure, and I seem to see it still:
A body with no head that moved along,
moving no differently from all the rest;

he held his severed head up by it hair,
swinging it in one hand just like a lantern,
and as it looked at us it said: ‘Alas!’

Of his own self he made himself a light
and they were two in one and one in two.
How could this be? He who ordained it knows.
.

by Dante Alligieri
from The Inferno
translated by Mark Musa, 1971

Randy Kennedy in The New York Times:

VENICE — The 18th-century novelist William Beckford wrote that he couldn’t help thinking of this city’s most beloved sight, St. Mark’s Basilica, as a mosque, with its “pinnacles and semicircular arches” all “so oriental in appearance.” But despite the profound stamp that Islamic culture has left on Venice’s art and architecture over centuries, it remains one of the few prominent European cities without a mosque near its historic center, leaving Islamic residents who work there to pray in storerooms and shops amid the tourist crush. For the next seven months, however, Venice will find itself in the middle of the roiling debate about Islam’s place in Europe. On Friday, as part of the Venice Biennale, a former Catholic church in the Cannaregio neighborhood will open its doors as a functioning mosque, its Baroque walls adorned with Arabic script, its floor covered with a prayer rug angled toward Mecca and its crucifix mosaics hidden behind a towering mihrab, or prayer niche.

The transformation is the work of a Swiss-Icelandic artist, Christoph Büchel, who has become known for politically barbed provocations. But the mosque, which will serve as Iceland’s national pavilion during the Biennale, is a cultural symbol and a kind of ready-made sculpture conceived with the active involvement of leaders of the area’s Islamic population, which has been growing for many years. Against a backdrop of rising Islamophobia in Italy and fears, like those at full throttle in France, of terrorism committed in the name of Islam, Muslim leaders in Venice said they saw the proposal to create a temporary mosque in the international spotlight of the Biennale as a perfect way to communicate their desire to more fully participate in the life of their city. “Sometimes you need to show yourself, to show that you are peaceful and that you want people to see your culture,” said Mohamed Amin Al Ahdab, president of the Islamic Community of Venice, which represents Muslims of about 30 nationalities living in greater Venice.

More here.

Mark Greif at n+1:

A SURPRISE OF BEING AROUND POLICE is how much they touch you. They touch you without consent and in both seemingly friendly and unfriendly ways. The friendly touch is the first surprise. A policeman allowing protesters to cross the street touches you on the arm or back as you cross. Face to face, police will put a hand on your shoulder, from the front, intimate as a dog putting his paw up. It is unnerving. Women say male police know very well how to touch, even in public sight, in ways that are professional and neutral, and also in ways that are humiliating and sexual, with no demonstrable distinction dividing the two. The police know, and you know. Like a reversal of electric polarity from protective to hostile, this conversion of mood does not only follow the policeman’s individual initiative. It traces something like an atmospheric charge among police in groups, their silent experience of a phenomenon, their habitual tactics in response.

In confrontations on a curb (when you stay on your sidewalk, because the public street is forbidden except to police), they may press lightly on your collarbone, “holding you back,” just measuring out the distance with their arms. You can even be held up in this way, if you relax.

more here.

Michael Schulman at The Believer:

In April 2013, Robert Black, a grad student at California State University, moved into a small apartment in South Pasadena. He and his wife of ten years had decided to split up, and he found himself spending much of that summer alone. He missed his kids: Hayley, Kieran, and Saer. “I needed something structured and regular in my life,” he recalled. On August 2, Black wrote a blog post entitled “On me in 3… 2… 1…” It was a line from the 1993 film Groundhog Day, which he had vowed to watch every day for a year.

The movie, if you’ve managed to miss it, follows a Pittsburgh weatherman named Phil Connors, played with impeccable sourness by Bill Murray. While reporting on the Groundhog Day festivities in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, Phil gets trapped in a mysterious time loop that forces him to relive the same day over and over again. By the end of the film, he has learned to embrace humanity and the charm of small-town life, and has won the affection of his producer, Rita (Andie MacDowell).

“Phil Connors,” Black wrote his first post, “is not only a great central character for a good comedy like this—not that there are many comedies like this—but he works as an everyman and he goes through all the emotions we all do every day of our lives. There is time in the film (not to mention the many parts of his journey we don’t see on screen) for joy, for sadness, for arrogance and humility, silliness and seriousness, flippancy and philosophy.”

more here.

Felipe Fernández-Armesto at Literary Review:

On the 'Golfing for Cats' principle, Noel Malcolm's publishers thought, presumably, that knights, corsairs, Jesuits and spies were saleable, whereas the real subject of Malcolm's new book, which might be expressed as 'A Reconstruction of the Political Activities of Members of Two Related Albanian Families in the Late Sixteenth-Century Eastern Mediterranean and Balkans', would be poor window-dressing. But good stories, well told, made bestsellers of The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs and A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian. We can be honest about Agents of Empire without fear of impeding sales.

Malcolm's protagonists are the Bruni and Bruti dynasties, who came from Venice to settle in Ulcinj, a predominantly Albanian-speaking port on the Venetian-dominated fringe of the Adriatic, in what is now Montenegro. They inhabited and traversed a frontier zone, hovering between Ottoman and Venetian empires, Spanish and Italian spheres of influence, Christendom and Islam, Roman and Eastern Churches and Romance, Slavic, Albanian, Greek and Turkish language areas. From a historian's point of view, it was a great place to live – one of those fateful peripheries where states and civilisations rub against each other and generate seismic effects. Malcolm was wise to look to this region for better, more vivid and more revealing insights than one gets from the usual metropolitan skylines. From the dwellers' perspective, however, the homeland of the Bruni and Bruti was dangerous, unstable and racked by war, want, plague and piracy. To Malcolm's indefatigable scholarship it yields stories of triumph and tragedy as compelling as any in fiction.

more here.

Adam Shatz in the LRB:

Gray was killed by a novel method: he was driven while black. Three police officers on bike patrol saw him at 8.30 a.m. on 12 April. It’s not clear why he was a person of interest, other than that he was a young black male. They made eye contact, and he ran, for reasons unknown. The officers arrested him and placed him face down. Unable to breathe, he asked for an inhaler, to no avail. The officers found a sliding knife on him, which is legal to carry, but charged him with possession of a switchblade, which isn’t. He was then shackled, placed in the back of a police wagon and driven without a seatbelt, as required by department regulations. By 8.59 a.m., he had suffered a major injury to his spinal cord. Again, he said that he couldn’t breathe and asked for medical assistance. The police waited another 25 minutes before calling for a medic. Gray died in hospital a week later.

This account of Gray’s killing was presented, in riveting, forensic detail, by Marilyn Mosby, the state’s attorney for Baltimore City, at a press conference on 1 May. Toward the end of her 16-minute speech, Mosby, a 35-year-old African-American woman, did the unthinkable: she charged six police officers with crimes ranging from murder to involuntary manslaughter. She promised justice to Gray’s parents and pleaded for peace so that she could do her work. Her press conference was as swift as it was bold. When someone dies in their custody, the Maryland police are not required to say anything until ten days later, a law that has been widely criticised by local politicians. Mosby beat the police to it, and made plain that it was unacceptable for them to leak details of the investigation. Black Baltimore, expecting an official whitewash, was electrified.

More here.