by Hasan Altaf

It seems like everyone I speak to has loved Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, and the reviews have also been generally glowing. My search for someone who shared my less rapturous feeling has so far been largely fruitless, and at this point I am beginning to think that there might be something wrong not with the movie, but with me. Midnight in Paris seemed to me kind of like a meringue: Light, harmless, and not entirely satisfying.

There is of course nothing at all wrong with meringues; they are what they are, and the kind of film that one enjoys while watching and then forgets about also serves a purpose. This is the land of summer comedies (Bad Teacher), the new crop of identical, CGI-enhanced superhero movies (take your pick), and even the vast majority of Bollywood. None of these genres, though, is greeted with the kind of rave reviews that Midnight in Paris has garnered.

Beyond the fact of Paris, the film has three things, as far as I can see, working in its favor. The music and the cinematography are undeniably great, but most of us don’t, in the end, watch movies for the cinematography or the music – at the Oscars, these are the categories we tend to glaze over, not recognizing any of the names, although we can appreciate their accomplishments when we see or hear them. On their own, these two feats don’t seem to merit the kind of reaction that the film has received.

The real selling point of Midnight in Paris is the conceit: The idea of the unexpected opportunity for a modern-day man to visit, each night, an era that he has always in some sense longed for, to rub shoulders with his idols, to sit across the table and be bored to tears by geniuses in the flesh. It’s a charming idea, a what-if game brought to life, and it’s hard to resist; it allows the audience to imagine themselves in that scenario, to wonder what it would happen if we could visit the periods of history that have enchanted each of us and meet whoever it was we always wanted to hang out with.

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by Jen Paton

This week, President Obama did a new thing with technology, conducting the nation’s first “Twitter Town Hall.” Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, noted in his introduction to the event that “millions of people around the world” use Twitter to “instantly connect to what is meaningful to them.” “Much of this conversation is made up of everyday people engaged in spirited debate about the future of their countries,” he added.

Viewers were given a Web address to submit questions to the president and urged by the baby faced Dorsey to “get the conversation started,” though the questions were ultimately selected by various regional curators. It was, according to Macon Phillips, the White House director of digital strategy, a way to “try to find new opportunities to connect with Americans around the country”.

In May of 1970, Richard Nixon, a less telegenic president, tried to connect with Americans, awaking before dawn to visit, unscheduled, the Lincoln Memorial and a group of war protesters there. According to Time, “his discussion rambled over the sights of the world that he had seen — Mexico City, the Moscow ballet, the cities of India. When the conversation turned to the war, Nixon told the students: “I know you think we are a bunch of so and so's.”

Nixon’s ramble came at a particularly fraught moment in American history: the expansion of the Vietnam war into Cambodia had reignited the student movement into a nationwide strike, with 441 universities shut down. The Kent State shootings had happened just the week before. The nation seemed fragmented, and Nixon’s promise to “lead the nation ‘forward together” less tenable than ever. With the visit, Nixon, said Time, “was trying his best to reconstruct consensus.”

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by Jeff Strabone

When Cy Twombly died last week on July 5, my first thought was that the greatest living painter had left us. That's because I am a simple fellow amused by such games as anointing The Greatest Living Painter and The Most Delicious Dinner Entrée in New York. (It's the duck at The Grocery on Smith Street.) Less foolishly, I hope, my second thought was that Twombly may have been the last great classicist in a world where classicism may no longer be an available position.

The obituary in the New York Times declared that Twombly was 'stubbornly out of step with the movements of postwar American art even as he became one of the era's most important painters'. Despite painting in a style that would not have been conceivable before the late twentieth century, Twombly stood outside his time chiefly because his deepest commitments were to an ideal of timeless classicism. Although he may have sidestepped the many competing art movements of his day, Twombly's classicism revealed a definite partisan affiliation: he was a Dionysian of the highest order.

All the recent notices remind us that Twombly was the painter who left New York. A more fitting epitaph would be that he was the classicist who went back to the source. Though he admired the beauty of his native Virginia, a place he said had more columns than all of Rome and Greece, he moved to Italy in his late twenties. His explanation tells us a lot: 'I've always lived in the south of Italy, because it's more excitable. It's volcanic.'

In literature and visual art, classicism is work that draws on ancient Greece and Rome, usually with reverent imitation. The poetry of Alexander Pope, for instance, is neoclassical because of its devotion to propriety, balance, and decorum in a way that was thought to mimic the values of the Augustan era in Rome. But classicism is not simply imitative. Any classicist worth our attention converts, in some distinct way, his traditional sources of inspiration into new methods, techniques, and styles.

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“(Physicist) Stephen Hawking … showed that black holes
were not completely black but could leak radiation …”

Crumb of Light

Black holes are not completely black.
One physicist says they leak light
so even in deepest space
where nothing breathes
where you couldn’t be more alone
where stillness is not peace but ice
where distance between entities
makes the idea of neighborhood absurd
where utter is deepest and space is most profound
where moons can’t kiss and the closest thing to embrace
is to orbit which is not an encircling of arms
but a constant falling away,
where the inertia of origin commands
that all things separate, expand,
proceed apart day after day
.
—even from the black eye of a black hole
a crumb of light is tossed
and the chance of seeing you again
is not forever lost

by Jim Culleny
5/10/11

By Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash

When two snails want to get it on, they caress each other with those stalks sticking out of their heads.

Then, they act.

Each snail drives, deep into the other, an inch-long dart. If a dart pierces a lung, brain, heart – death. Fatal foreplay.

But let’s assume they survive. What do they do?

First they draw apart, terribly wounded.

But also, terribly excited.

So they draw together again. And out of each snail’s head grows a penis.

Yeah, each snail has a penis.

The penises grow as long as the snails themselves.

Yup, proportionately the lowly snail has the biggest dick of them all.

Now they slip their giant organs into each other’s vaginas.

Yup, each snail has a vagina.

The giant vaginas suck on the giant penises until they ejaculate.

Then the two snails drop away from each other.

Deeply wounded, they lie quietly for a long time, stunned by what’s happened. Eventually they crawl off in opposite directions.

The sex life of the snail tells us: the intensity of love can only be measured by the depth of its damage. Existence is most keenly felt when it’s most endangered.

What excites the snail to screw? A stimulation so great, it threatens the snail’s life.

This makes the snail the most romantic figure alive.

Pain, death, sex: the snail is an exemplary creature.

Eat it in awe.

by Kevin Baldwin

Islands have always been fascinating places. The old story-tellers, wishing to recount a prodigy, almost invariably fixed the scene on an island — Faery and Avalon, Atlantis and Cipango, all golden islands just over the horizon where anything at all might happen. And in the old days at least it was rather difficult to check up on them. Perhaps this quality of potential prodigy still lives on in our attitude towards islands.

— John Steinbeck, from The Log from the Sea of Cortez, 1941

Introduction

In addition to providing great settings for stories, islands have also been a source of fascination and inspiration to biologists. They have had an influence on biology, ecology, and conservation that is far greater than their small areas would suggest. Because they frequently occur in groups called archipelagos, they provide separate but similar environments that have in effect, acted as replicated natural experiments for both nature and the scientists who study it. In the 19th century, Darwin and Wallace's explorations of the Galapagos Islands and Malay Archipelago clearly demonstrated patterns in nature that begged for explanation. It is doubtful that the they would have made their intellectual leaps to the elucidation of natural selection without having experienced those sites first-hand. Islands are like conceptual models: They offer simplified versions of reality. Smaller and less diverse than continents, patterns on islands were easier to see and comprehend.

I. Island Biogeography

In the 20th century, islands were important in advancing our understanding the origin and maintenance of diversity of species. In 1967, Robert MacArthur and Edward Wilson published a book entitled “The Theory of Island Biogeography” that revolutionized the study of ecology and biogeography. MacArthur and Wilson's approach was radical in that it deliberately avoided historical explanations for species diversity and sought to identify and explain more general patterns based upon current organisms' attributes and their relationships to current environments. It also refocused ecological inquiry from simply describing patterns to generating and testing theories that could account for those patterns.

The three island patterns that were linked together by a common theory were:

1. Species-area relationships: Larger islands have more species than smaller ones (there are more places to live, and species are less likely to go extinct if there are more individuals spread over a large area).

2. Isolation: Islands that are farther away from the mainland have fewer species than ones close to land.

3. Species turnover: The number of species on an island tends to remain constant although the identity of the species may change through a process called species turnover.

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by Aditya Dev Sood

I’ve been reading Gandhi’s writings off and on for several months now, but just last week I turned to Joseph Lelyveld’s recent book on him. I’d been thinking about the kind of attitude towards the present that Gandhi must have had, in order to undertake social change at such a spectacular scale. How did Gandhi balance his quest for change with the full possibilities of the present, the taste of the world as he found it? Does Gandhi’s life and thought have a particular aesthetic, and if so, how can we better describe it? Great Soul has many virtues, foremost among them, perhaps, being nuance, and both curiosity and sensitivity to the progressive way in which Gandhi came to acquire his moral compass, his powers of communication and persuasion, and the bouquet of social technologies through which he was able to effect change. Being neither acolyte nor nationalist historiographer, Lelyveld is able to read Gandhi beyond his canonization, first in India, and more recently in post-apartheid South Africa.

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by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

Properly run argument requires that we give reasons that provide support for the truth of our conclusions, that we do our best to be clear, and that we stay focused on the issue at hand. But it is possible to succeed in these ways and yet fail to argue properly. We must also respond to each other’s reasons, and this requires that we accurately represent our opponents’ views. When we fail in this latter respect, we commit the Straw Man fallacy.

Although it is common to speak of the Straw Man fallacy, there are actually several Straw Men. What they have in common is that they manifest a certain failure of dialogue. This makes Straw Men different from many other fallacy forms. Inductive fallacies—such as Hasty Generalization—and relevance fallacies—like Scare Tactics—are internal to the individual’s reasoning: Just because some X’s are Y’s, it doesn’t mean that all X’s are Y’s; just because doing A is risky, it doesn’t follow that it’s wrong to do. One can commit these errors on one’s own. But straw-manning involves the misrepresentation of an interlocutor’s view; consequently, Straw Man fallacies involve more than one person. When we commit a straw man fallacy, we fail to live up to the responsibilities of the exchange of reasons. Consider:

Military Spending

Adam: We really need to beef up our military budget—the world’s a dangerous place.

Betty: No way! We don’t need to devote our whole economy to being the world’s bully.

Betty’s right about not needing to pour a country’s entire budget into being a bully, but that’s not what Adam proposed. Betty misrepresents Adam’s view; therefore, she’s not in proper dialogue with Adam. This simple case exemplifies the standard form of the Straw Man. We’ve called it elsewhere the representational form of the Straw Man fallacy; the distortion happens when a specific interlocutor’s views are not accurately represented.

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by Misha Lepetic

“Whoever lays his hand on me to govern me is a usurper and tyrant, and I declare him my enemy.”
– Proudhon

Back in undergraduate days, when, if it is to be believed, my prose was even more incomprehensible than it is now, I wrote a paper on the economic history of the concept of private property ownership. After 37 pages, and having only reached JS Mill, I bowed out as gracefully as I could, and spent the next week wondering how anyone could be said to own anything at all. And yet, society’s legal and social construction of property ownership continues to be of the utmost importance in setting the course for economic development in general, and urbanization in particular.

In this sense, past commentators have looked at housing as an especially crucial area, since the larger issue of urban migration had already reached a boiling point in Europe by the mid-19^th century. The work of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon is worth singling out in this regard. Originally an unapologetic Anarchist best known for the pithy aphorism “property is theft”, by the end of his life Proudhon had moderated his views considerably. Writing in the posthumously published Théorie de la Propriété,

“…property is the greatest revolutionary force which exists, with an unequaled capacity for setting itself against authority … [The] principal function of private property within the political system will be to act as a counterweight to the power of the State, and by so doing to insure the liberty of the individual.” Proudhon, quoted in Gray, p135

For the later Proudhon, the validity of property is resurrected only “if it is purged and infused with justice” (Gray, p243). Specifically, this right to property would encourage workers to defend themselves against the depredations of the State and its capitalist abettors. In contrast, the propagation of rent-based housing only exacerbated the uncertainty of their situation. It would also go a ways towards preventing slum clearance, which was as ineffective then as it is now. In fact, two decades after Proudhon’s death in 1865, Great Britain’s Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes published a report where the acknowledged that

Rookeries are destroyed, greatly to the sanitary and social benefit of the neighborhood, but no kind of habitation for the poor has been substituted… The consequence of such a proceeding is that the unhoused population crowd into the neighboring streets and courts…and when the new dwellings are complete…the tenants are not the…persons displaced [so that] those whose need is greatest suffer most acutely. (p19-20)

Thus Proudhon’s hope was that, in aggregate, the landowning proletarian class would throw up a legal-materialistic barricade against those who would otherwise bulldoze their neighborhoods and subsequently engage in the kind of property speculations that only further exacerbate income inequality and displacement of urban populations.

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by Rishidev Chaudhuri

For the first week after I began taking a cell biology class I dreamed of deserts, vast sterile expanses of open heat with no living things, interrupted only by dreams of inter-galactic space and the structured infinity of mathematical forms. There is something profoundly disturbing and eerie about life at the molecular level. It is too purposive and awake to see it as inert matter – it is impossible not to anthropomorphize it or, more accurately, to attempt to make sense of its motives in the same way we do for people. And yet it is too alien to anthropomorphize in any useful way. Somehow, brute matter has figured out how to replicate itself and has exploded into a cacophony of form. Here proteins rush around cells carrying other proteins on their heads; other proteins slice and dice and reassemble yet other proteins[1]. It is so easily seen as a parody of human ends. Looking into a microscope we are alienated from ourselves by our cells. We stare into a world of automata, a world made uncanny by the juxtaposition of its echo of and utter distance from our world.

To their credit, there is nothing explicitly malevolent about microscopic life or its components, even things as sinister as prions. The suspicion of matter that they induce is not the Gnostic horror of waking up and finding oneself trapped in a coffin that is actively conspiring to stay shut. And it lacks the single-mindedness of a thriving Schopenhauerian will to life. And neither is it the anguish of finding oneself alive in a universe indifferent to life; matter seems all too eager to become animate. If anything, we seem to find ourselves viewing matter in company with the early Buddhists, as life-creating but amoral. They, finding themselves doomed by nature to live (and suffer as an incidental effect), and for whom suicide was subverted by rebirth, sought to live so as to break the chain of causation and extinguish themselves.

Of course we don’t understand the strange frontier towns where inanimate matter begins to wriggle and repeat, though we have lots of interesting speculation about what might happen at those boundaries. In the molecular world of modern life, DNA stores information; this information is transcribed into RNA; and then some RNA is then translated into proteins, which carry out most of the functions of life. Among other things, proteins catalyze a host of reactions needed for life. In one possible origin-of-life scenario, RNA performs the functions of both DNA and proteins: it both stores information and catalyzes its own production and replication. Chains of RNA get longer and more complex, eventually beginning to co-operate with each other and to catalyze the assembly of amino acids into proteins. Eventually, the proteins take over much of the structural and catalytic work, and DNA, being more stable, takes over the information storage.

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by Michael Blim

Ben Bernanke met the press this past week with no good news to report. Rather he admitted that “we don’t have a precise read on why this slower pace of growth is persisting. Some of the headwinds that have been concerning us, like the weakness in the financial sector, problems in the housing sector, balance sheet and deleveraging issues, may be stronger and more persistent than we thought.”

And how. The US economic recovery now almost two years old is the weakest of economic bounce backs over the past one hundred years, according to Richard Milne in the June 25 Financial Times, and economic policy elites like Bernanke are mightily perplexed. Output growth continues to falter, and unemployment will remain as high as seven to seven and a half percent through 2013. Instead of figuring out what to do next, Bernanke et.al. find themselves spending most of their time defending what they have already done as saving America and the world from something much worse.

As the economy slows once more, and the housing market worsens, the chances of really bad knock-on effects increase. You may recall that the collapse of the value of mortgage-backed securities (MBSs) triggered the panic that sent the world economy reeling. Well, those bad securities, some half a trillion dollars worth, are still sloshing around in Wall Street basements, still able to help take us under should the economy start to tank once more.

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by Colin Marshall

How often do we get two great cinematic tastes that, as they say, go great together? The Taiwanese director Hsiao-hsien Hou and the Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu both, I would argue, display great taste, especially of the visual and rhythmic varietes. (Some insist Ozu had a tin ear, at least for music. Me, I could never strip his movies of those wobbly domestic strings.) But, separated by more than a generation, they never had a chance to collaborate. The next best opportunity came along in 2003, the 100th anniversary of Ozu's birth (and the 40th anniversary of his death). To mark the occasion, Hou made Café Lumière, his homage to the master of the small-scale, the unspoken, and the pillow shot.

Film scholars don't need to waste their time building arguments about whether Ozu's influence really drives the film; “For the centenary of Ozu's birth,” a title card nakedly announces right up front. The Ozu diehard, naturally, will only need to have seen the Shochiku logo. Crafting this project under the auspices of the studio for which Ozu worked all his life signals a certain seriousness, especially for a foreign filmmaker in a land famously protective of its inner life. And when this picture reveals how it sees Tokyo — well, case closed.

As unappealingly obsessive as it might sound, Café Lumière never strays far from the mechanics of public transit. Its story opens with a shot of a passing urban train, and many more of them appear throughout. These trains appear not as a fixture of a wealthy megalopolis but as part of a living, breathing, startingly calm organism grown also out of laundry lines, endless layers of icons and text, and web upon web of power and telephone lines. I hadn't glimpsed this sort of Tokyo since Ozu last captured it in the early sixties, this unassuming Tokyo seen, if not always at ground level, at least never from a much higher viewpoint than the average commuter enjoys.

Legend has it that Ozu shot his “home dramas” (including but most certainly not limited to Late Spring, Tokyo Story, and, previously written up in this column, Equinox Flower) with the camera mounted at the height of someone seated on a tatami mat. It always seemed a little higher than that to me, but the humility of the aesthetic choice still came across. It suited the humility of the circumstances; the homes in which his dramas played out always housed the stripe of family that, while appearing outwardly “middle class” to modern audiences, clearly sufferent from the kind of poverty — perhaps “lack” gets closer — that touched everyone in a Japan still so fresh from the Second World War.

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“There is a wisdom that is woe; but there is a woe that is madness.”
—Herman Melville; Moby Dick
“All politicians are loco.”
—Roshi Bob (with a tip o' the hat to Tip O'Neill)

Whatever Floats Your Pequod

Call me Ishmael
—no, on second thought don’t

Call me Lazarus because
I now have a second skin
—the old one was flayed
by a single-minded madman
ambulating on a stump

Below decks
you’d hear him articulating
his loathing of life
to the cadence of the thud
of his wooden leg upon
quarter-deck boards
a rumble overhead
like the thunder
of a gathering storm

Call me Lone Survivor
alive by dint of flotsam and luck
—if you call it luck to have been
under the spell and thumb
of a lunatic chasing a
malevolent memory

Call me Happy To Be Alive
—and do I have a story for you!
Now when I breath the air
of summer blossoms
and taste its berries
I know what they mean

Call me The Old Man And The Sea;
someone eventually will
—big fish are hard to let be
and we all know the allure
of horizons; but

no, really

call me Queequeg's Confidant,
buddy of a harpooneer, an island
prince in a tattoo shirt
in a small boat chasing
mammoth mammals
psyched for murder
aiming to slay them
with a tiny, tooled spear
its tip all meanness
and barbarity

Call me Henchman in pursuit
of lamplight, of oil and cash reaped
from the flesh of leviathan

Call me Ishmael or call me Man
whatever floats your Pequod
It’s all the same to me

by Jim Culleny, 6/23/11

by Tom Jacobs

Why should we not enjoy an original relation to the universe?
~ Emerson, “Nature”

One of the most important and enjoyable responsibilities given to a young altar boy is to ring a set of bells at the moment the priest holds the communion host above his head and proclaims something along the lines of:

The lord took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, “This is my body which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.”

The reason we rang these bells, my parish priest told me years ago when he first trained me to become an altar boy, is to draw the parishoners’ attention so that they are reminded of what is going on up on stage, as it were. And what is going on up there is meant to be breathtaking and awesome. The little, tasteless piece of circular, unleavened “bread” becomes, at that precise moment in the ceremony of the Eucharist, the actual body of Christ, which we are all then invited to eat. When I was first told this, I was surprised and astounded. What we were doing every Sunday was eating the flesh of a deity (and just after, having a little tug of his blood).

Of course, I had my doubts about the genuineness of this transformation, but still I found the whole concept rather amazing. This is not the sort of thing one sees everyday (unless you go to daily mass, I suppose). To think that these little unremarkable wafers that I had taken out of their little chinese-take out-looking boxes and placed in the tabernacle not one hour earlier, had now become the literal body of a god was an extraordinary idea, and a nice piece of theater, too, it must be said.[i]

And it was my job to ring the bells to get everyone to pay attention, if only for a moment, at what was going on before them. No less astonishing was the parishoners’ typical response: boredom, wristwatch-looking, ongoing attempts to stop one’s children from squirming and playing with their siblings in the pews. Nobody seemed to really grasp what was occurring before them, and even those who did, didn’t seem much to care.

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by Vivek Menezes

It’s 1am, pouring heavily on an overcast monsoon night, and I’ve been waiting to talk to Sebastiao Frias for almost two hours.

But he’s still elbow-deep in his work, dusted from brow to toes in wheat flour, and moving with the distinctive balletic grace that master craftsmen acquire after decades of practice.

A seemingly unending series of trays are lined up next to his hip, become filled at full speed with little nubs of steadily ‘proving’ dough (each snipped off by feel alone, yet almost exactly identical to the next), then set aside to await a pre-dawn turn in the massive, ancient oven which dominates the largest room in this old house in Panjim, the pocket-sized capital city of India’s smallest state.

Frias began his evening’s labours as always, preparing thousands of ‘unde’ for baking. These palm-sized, egg-shaped loaves of crusty bread are the addictive favourite of Ponnjekars, the residents of this pleasant riverside city, where ‘pao bhaji’ has to be accompanied by an ‘undo’ or it is not considered the genuine article, and most dailyroutines begin with the ritual purchase of the morning’s supply from a deliveryman who brings the bread right to the front door of every household in the city (the evening’s supply comes separately, in another round of deliveries).

The clock keeps ticking, and I find myself mesmerized by Frias’s swift, efficient movements, the dough rolled out in table-top sized slabs, then kneaded into cables and ropes and knots, then back again across the counter.

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