Kenan Malik in Pandaemonium:

I gave a talk at the launch at London’s Institut Français of Libraries without Borders, the charity inspired by Patrick Weil that aims to increase global access to books and libraries. Also speaking were Ian McEwan, Lisa Appignanesi, Barbara Band and Patrick Weil himself. Here is a transcript of my talk:

Let me begin with a story not of a library or a book but of a grand piano. The one grand piano in Gaza, that was discovered still intact in a theatre destroyed by an Israeli missile during last year’s war. A piano that has been restored string by string, hammer by hammer, by Claire Bertrand, a young French music technician who travelled to Gaza specially to bring the piano back to life, in a project financed by Daniel Barenboim.

Last week, the piano formed the centerpiece of a concert, in which 15-year old Sara Aqel, the star pupil in Gaza’s only music school, performed Beethoven’s 19th sonata. Why in a land so devastated by war, in which tens of thousands are homeless, in which hospitals can barely function, in which food is often scarce, and which for many feels like a vast prison, should so much fuss be made of one piano?

Because to be human is more than simply to survive, or to seek food and shelter. It is also to imagine, to hope, to dream, to transcend, to transform.

Music in a place like Gaza, in the words of Lukas Pairon, from Music Fund, the charity that helped restore the grand piano, ‘is a form of rebellion against being narrowly defined as living beings who only want the basic things – food, protection, security – who are only in survival mode.’ Or as Sara Aqel put it, ‘Music might not build you a house or give you your loved-ones back. But it gives you joy.’

More here.

Jason Koebler in Motherboard:

​Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and SpaceX, and chairman of SolarCity, and the guy who dreamt up the hyper loop, says we shouldn't need an environmentally motivated reason to transition to clean energy. We're probably going to run out of oil sometime; why find out if we can destroy the world while we do it, if an alternative exists?

“If we don't find a solution to burning oil for transport, when we then run out of oil, the economy will collapse and society will come to an end,” Musk said this week during a conversation with astrophysicist and Cosmos host Neil deGrasse Tyson.

“If we know we have to get off oil no matter what, we know that is an inescapable outcome, why run this crazy experiment of changing the chemical composition of the atmosphere and oceans by adding enormous amounts of CO2 that have been buried since the Precambrian Era?” he added. “That's crazy. That's the dumbest experiment in history, by far.”

Tyson sounded surprised: “Can you think of a dumber experiment?” he asked Musk.

“I honestly cannot. What good could possibly come of [staying on oil],” Musk said.

Musk, with his supercharger stations, SolarCity (his solar energy company), his electric car company that will soon rely on a “Gigafactory” to create its batteries, has a huge financial stake in the future of clean energy. He stands so much to gain from the clean energy boom in part because he's realized that not only are fossil fuels dirty, they're unnecessary—and of finite supply.

More here.

I Saw Myself
.
I saw myself
a ring of bone
in the clear stream
of all of it

and vowed,
always to be open to it
that all of it
might flow through

and then I heard
”ring of bone” where
ring is what a

bell does
.

by Lew Welch
from Ring of Bone, Collected Poems 1950-1971
Grey Fox Press, 1979

Charles Simic in NYRB blog:

One of the compensations of being an insomniac in a snowbound house full of books is that I can always find something to read and distract myself from whatever mood I’m in. When it gets real bad, I roam the dark house with a flashlight like Hamlet’s father’s ghost, pull books off the shelves, open them at random or thumb the pages until I find something of interest, and after reading it, either go back to bed happy or grope for another book.

…What I need to look at, I told myself another night, is Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy, which the respected scholar and statesman wrote while awaiting execution in 524 in Pavia on trumped-up charges. It’s a story of a man, unjustly suffering and bemoaning his fate, having extended conversations with Philosophy, who appears to him as a highborn lady and tells him that wisdom and happiness may be found even in adversity, since it frees us from bondage to transient, earthly things, or something like that. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the book, so I had to console myself with David Hume, the famously obese eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher of whom his admiring contemporaries said that he cracked every chair he sat in. Leafing through hisOn Human Nature and the Understanding, I found this little parable:

Should a traveler, returning from a far country, bring us an account of men wholly different from any with whom we were ever acquainted, men who were entirely divested of avarice, ambition, or revenge, who knew no pleasure but friendship, generosity, and public spirit, we should immediately, from these circumstances, detect the falsehood and prove him a liar with the same certainty as if he had stuffed his narration with stories of centaurs and dragons, miracles and prodigies.

Hmm, I thought to myself after I read it, this reminds me a bit of those reports of Soviet Union under Stalin penned by some Parisian intellectual or a description by one of our own politicians of American Exceptionalism. As a sedative, however, it wouldn’t do. I’d get so excited thinking about the various ways Hume’s parable could be rewritten to make it more suitable to our present circumstances and I’d be up for a week.

Read the rest here.

Malcolm Forbes at The Quarterly Conversation:

Antal Szerb’s lithe, lively, and wholly endearing fiction is peopled by male dreamers on spiritual journeys of self-discovery. Each one sets out on his respective mini-mission with good intentions but knows from the outset that there are only so many harsh truths he can withstand. In this respect, all Szerb’s protagonists seem to have heeded the advice of Greene’s Dr. Hasselbacher at the beginning of Our Man in Havana: “You should dream more, Mr. Wormold. Reality in our century is not something to be faced.”

Dr. János Bátky, the narrator of Szerb’s first full-length novel, The Pendragon Legend(1934), is a Hungarian academic on sabbatical in Great Britain. When he is invited to the Welsh castle of the Earl of Gwynedd he is dragged into a world of family intrigue, superstition, treachery, and murder. After enough nocturnal escapades and jangled nerves he yearns to beat a retreat to London, “Back to the British Museum, to the impregnable calmness of books.” “You speak like someone who has no ideals,” the enchanting Cynthia tells him. “True,” Bátky replies, “I am a neo-frivolist.” Bátky appears again in a short story from the same year, “A Dog Called Madelon.” His unwillingness to accept humdrum normality is made clear in the first paragraph.

more here.

Michael Gove in The Spectator:

Praying? What kind of people are you?

Well, the kind of people who built our civilisation, founded our democracies, developed our modern ideas of rights and justice, ended slavery, established universal education and who are, even as I write, in the forefront of the fight against poverty, prejudice and ignorance. In a word, Christians. But to call yourself a Christian in contemporary Britain is to invite pity, condescension or cool dismissal. In a culture that prizes sophistication, non-judgmentalism, irony and detachment, it is to declare yourself intolerant, naive, superstitious and backward. It was almost 150 years ago that Matthew Arnold wrote of the Sea of Faith’s ‘melancholy, long, withdrawing roar’ and in our time that current has been replaced by an incoming tide of negativity towards Christianity. In his wonderful book Unapologetic, the author Francis Spufford describes the welter of prejudice the admission of Christian belief tends to unleash. ‘It means that we believe in a load of bronze-age absurdities. It means that we don’t believe in dinosaurs. It means that we’re dogmatic. That we’re self-righteous. That we fetishise pain and suffering. That we advocate wishy-washy niceness. That we promise the oppressed pie in the sky when they die… That we build absurdly complex intellectual structures, full of meaningless distinctions, on the marshmallow foundations of fantasy… That we destroy the spontaneity and hopefulness of children by implanting a sick mythology in young minds…’

And that’s just for starters. If we’re Roman Catholic we’re accessories to child abuse, if we’re Anglo-Catholics we’re homophobic bigots curiously attached to velvet and lace, if we’re liberal Anglicans we’re pointless hand-wringing conscience–hawkers, and if we’re evangelicals we’re creepy obsessives who are uncomfortable with anyone enjoying anything more louche than a slice of Battenberg.

More here.

Philip Caputo in The New York Times:

The more powerful a country is, the more disposed its people will be to see it as the lead actor in the sometimes farcical, often tragic pageant of history. So it is that we, citizens of a superpower, have viewed the Vietnam War as a solely American drama in which the febrile land of tigers and elephants was mere backdrop and the Vietnamese mere extras. That outlook is reflected in the literature — and Vietnam was a very literary war, producing an immense library of fiction and nonfiction. Among all those volumes, you’ll find only a handful (Robert Olen Butler’s “A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain” comes to mind) with Vietnamese characters speaking in their own voices.

…But this tragicomic novel reaches beyond its historical context to illuminate more universal themes: the eternal misconceptions and misunderstandings between East and West, and the moral dilemma faced by people forced to choose not between right and wrong, but right and right. The nameless protagonist-­narrator, a memorable character despite his anonymity, is an Americanized Vietnamese with a divided heart and mind. ­Nguyen’s skill in portraying this sort of ambivalent personality compares favorably with masters like Conrad, Greene and le Carré. Duality is literally in the protagonist’s blood, for he is a half-caste, the illegitimate son of a teenage Vietnamese mother (whom he loves) and a French Catholic priest (whom he hates). Widening the split in his nature, he was educated in the United States, where he learned to speak English without an accent and developed another love-hate relationship, this one with the country that he feels has coined too many “super” terms (supermarkets, ­superhighways, the Super Bowl, and so on) “from the federal bank of its ­narcissism.”

More here.

Steven Weinberg in The Guardian:

If you had a chance to ask Aristotle what he thought of the idea of writing about physical science for general readers, he would not have understood what you meant. All of his own writing, on physics and astronomy as well as on politics and aesthetics, was accessible to any educated Greek of his time. This is not evidence so much of Aristotle’s skills as a writer, or of the excellence of Greek education, as it is of the primitive state of Hellenic physical science, which made no effective use of mathematics. It is mathematics above all that presents an obstacle to communication between professional scientists and the general educated public. The development of pure mathematics was already well under way in Aristotle’s day, but its use in science by Plato and the Pythagoreans had been childish, and Aristotle himself had little interest in the use of mathematics in science. He perceptively concluded from the appearance of the night sky at different latitudes that the Earth is a sphere, but he did not bother to use these observations (as could have been done) to calculate the size of our planet.

Physical science began seriously to benefit from mathematics only after Aristotle’s death in 322BC, when the vital centre of science moved from Athens to Alexandria. But the indispensable use of mathematics by Hellenistic physicists and astronomers began to get in the way of communication between scientists and the public. Looking over the surviving highly mathematical works of Aristarchus, Archimedes and Ptolemy, we can feel a twinge of sympathy for Greeks or Greek-speaking Romans who tried to keep up with the latest discoveries about light, fluids or the planets.

It was not long before writers called “commentators” began to try to fill this gap.

More here.

John Mullan in The Guardian:

Has fantasy fiction, for decades a thriving literary genre, finally taken its place in the literary mainstream? It hardly needs bien pensant “literary” admirers: the most successful fantasy novelists have not only their sales figures to encourage them, but also the host of companion volumes, analytical websites, conferences and online commentaries that characterise fantasy fandom. It is a genre that has always generated critical expertise, and fantasy novelists have long been in a dialogue with their readers that other novelists must envy (witness the attention given to every tweet made by Neil Gaiman to his 2.2 million followers). Fantasy’s devotees must feel rueful as the critics now rush to declare their addiction to HBO’s Game of Thrones – adapted from George RR Martin’s multi-volume fantasy saga A Song of Ice and Fire, and about to enter series five – or record their admiration of Terry Pratchett, as part of the overwhelming response to his recent death. The debt to fantasy fiction of The Buried Giant, the new novel by one of Britain’s leading literary novelists, Kazuo Ishiguro, must seem overdue vindication of the genre.

Ishiguro has spoken in the past few weeks of how the barrier between this once-disdained brand of fiction and “serious” novels is breaking down. If this is true, New Jersey-born George RR Martin has surely led the charge. Martin is the reigning laureate of fantasy fiction. His ongoing sequence of novels A Song of Ice and Fire (the first book of which gives its title to Game of Thrones) began appearing in 1996 and now comprises five long books (with two more promised). He has a host of fans who resent the low status accorded to their favoured genre and some distinguished admirers who rather agree. One proponent of Martin’s merits, accomplished literary novelist John Lanchester, has openly invited literary snobs to cross that apparently “unbridgeable crevasse” between the readership of fantasy and “the wider literate public”. Discussing the delights of Martin’s fantasy roman fleuve, Lanchester has celebrated not only its creation of a richly imagined world, but the prevailing “sense of unsafety and uncertainty” of that world.

More here.

“The evening goes blind, and you are only twenty.”
– Nathan Alterman, Late Afternoon in the Market

Woman Martyr

You are only twenty
and your first pregnancy is a bomb.
Under your broad skirt you are pregnant with dynamite
and metal shavings. This is how you walk in the market,
ticking among the people, you, Andaleeb Takatkah.

Someone tinkered with your head
and launched you toward the city;
even though you come from Bethlehem,
the Home of Bread, you chose a bakery.
And there you pulled the trigger out of yourself,
and together with the Sabbath loaves,
sesame and poppy seed,
you flung yourself into the sky.

Together with Rebecca Fink you flew up
with Yelena Konre’ev from the Caucasus
and Nissim Cohen from Afghanistan
and Suhila Houshy from Iran
and two Chinese you swept along
to death.

Since then, other matters
have obscured your story,
about which I speak all the time
without having anything to say.

by Agi Mishol
from Meevkhar veh-hadashim (New and selected poems)
publisher: Mossad Bialik and Hakibbutz Hameuchad
translation: 2006, Lisa Katz

Michelle Kuo and Albert Wu at The Point:

The historian E. P. Thompson wrote famously that he wanted to rescue the working class “from the enormous condescension of posterity.” For Thompson, the historian’s calling was to give voice to the voiceless and recreate the heroic struggles of everyday life. The aim of writing history, he believed, was to capture faithfully the experiences of those who had been neglected by traditional histories, written out of the heroic narratives of “great men.”

In Elena Ferrante’s Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, the third and most explicitly political book in her celebrated Neapolitan tetralogy, Ferrante tests literature’s capacity to answer Thompson’s challenge. She asks: Can writing actually capture life? Can it give voice to the voiceless? The narrator Elena Greco, herself a writer, has a subject that Thompson would find ideal: her best friend Lila. In contrast to Elena, who leaves Naples to attend an elite university, Lila’s schooling ends in the fifth grade, after her parents refuse to pay for further lessons. Eventually Lila marries a local grocer and then, following her divorce, remains in the Naples neighborhood where both girls grew up, and works for a time in a sausage factory.

more here.

Jerry Saltz at New York Magazine:

“Surround Audience” purports to examine “a world in which the effects of technology … have been absorbed into our bodies and altered our vision of the world … visual metaphors for the self and subjecthood.” Before you bristle — Excuse me, all art does this — not only are there no keyboards, workstations, or websites here, and only one helmet (Daniel Steegmann Mangrané's fantastically alluring depiction of layered linear space), there are, thankfully, no darkened rooms with portentous videos that make you wonder if curators are human beings aware that they're spending fortunes while abusing the curiosity, patience, and humanity of their audience. That's a big leap for the art world. These curators understand, finally, that there's no such thing as “digital art” (certainly no variety that could be defined by the machines it’s made of and through), only art that might be inscribed with its ethos. And while the show includes a tad too much arty-adolescent apocalyptic dystopianism, there's, happily, no annoying, New Age–y, utopian-Zeitgeist babble.

More important, it is full of artists thinking past objects of the digital era and addressing the much weirder experience of actually living in it and recognizing, all the while, that this landscape is already authored by and is us anyway, that there's little distinction anymore between inside and outside, and that engaging with technologies doesn't have to involve a computer, mouse, or iPhone.

more here.

Elif Batuman at The New Yorker:

The human drive to zap one’s head with electricity goes back at least to antiquity, and was originally satisfied by means of electric fish. “Headache even if it is chronic and unbearable is taken away and remedied forever by a live torpedo placed under the spot that is in pain,” the first-century physician Scribonius Largus wrote. He also used the torpedo, a species of ray native to the Mediterranean, to treat hemorrhoids. In the eleventh century, the Islamic polymath Avicenna reportedly recommended the placement of an electric catfish on the brow to counteract epilepsy. As late as 1762, a Dutch colonist in Guyana wrote that “when a slave complains of a bad headache” he should put one hand on his head and another on a South American electric eel and “will be helped immediately, without exception.”

The invention, in 1745, of the Leyden jar—a device to store static electricity—enabled many new experiments in electrotherapy, not all of them deliberate. In 1783, Jan Ingenhousz, a Dutch scientist, accidentally picked up a charged Leyden jar, causing an explosion that made him temporarily lose his memory, judgment, and ability to read and write. Having found his way home with great difficulty, he went to sleep. He woke to find that his mental faculties had not only returned but had sharpened: “I saw much clearer the difficulties of every thing,” he wrote in a letter to Benjamin Franklin. “What did formerly seem to me difficult to comprehend, was now become of an easy solution.”

more here.

Katherine Harmon Courage in Scientific American:

Your gut is the site of constant turf wars. Hundreds of bacterial species—along with fungi, archaea and viruses—do battle daily, competing for resources. Some companies advocate for consuming more probiotics, live beneficial bacteria, to improve microbial communities in our gut, but more and more research supports the idea that the most powerful approach might be to better feed the good bacteria we already harbor. Their meal of choice? Fiber.

Fiber has long been linked to better health, but new research shows how the gut microbiota might play a role in this pattern. One investigation discovered that adding more fiber to the diet can trigger a shift from a microbial profile linked to obesity to one correlated with a leaner physique. Another recent study shows that when microbes are starved of fiber, they can start to feed on the protective mucus lining of the gut, possibly triggering inflammation and disease. “Diet is one of the most powerful tools we have for changing the microbiota,” Justin Sonnenburg, a biologist at Stanford University, said earlier this month at a Keystone Symposia conference on the gut microbiome. “Dietary fiber and diversity of the microbiota complement each other for better health outcomes.” In particular, beneficial microbes feast on fermentable fibers—which can come from various vegetables, whole grains and other foods—that resist digestion by human-made enzymes as they travel down the digestive tract. These fibers arrive in the large intestine relatively intact, ready to be devoured by our microbial multitudes. Microbes can extract the fiber's extra energy, nutrients, vitamins and other compounds for us. Short-chain fatty acids obtained from fiber are of particular interest, as they have been linked to improved immune function, decreased inflammation and protection against obesity. Today's Western diet, however, is exceedingly fiber-poor by historical standards. It contains roughly 15 grams of fiber daily, Sonnenburg noted. For most of our early history as hunter-gatherers, we were likely eating close to 10 times that amount of fiber each day. “Imagine the effect that has on our microbiota over the course of our evolution,” he said.

More here.