Robert Macfarlane in More Intelligent Life:

Humbert Humbert, literature's best-known paedophile, calls it his “joy-ride”. For a year he tours the back-roads of rural America, with Lolita, who is 12, as his coerced companion and his regular victim. Together they cover thousands of miles in Humbert’s sedan, gliding down the “glossy” black-top from New England to the Rockies via the Midwestern corn prairies. They become connoisseurs of motel America—“the stucco court”, “the adobe unit”, “the log cabin”—always checking in as father and daughter, and never staying longer than a couple of nights. Milk bars and diners are their mealtime haunts; tiny tourist traps (“a lighthouse in Virginia…a granite obelisk commemorating the Battle of Blue Licks”) their daylight destinations.

Vladimir Nabokov’s account of this loathsome road-trip occupies less than a tenth of his notorious novel. To me these are the most brilliantly unsettling pages he ever wrote: a Baedeker of perversion that—in Humbert’s phrase—“put[s] the geography of the United States in motion”, as he and poor Lo career across the “crazy quilt of forty-eight states”. If you’ve read “Lolita” (1955), you’ll know the disturbing dissonance it incites. For Humbert is a narrator of astonishing guile, his voice so slyly supple that it distracts from the black vileness of his deeds. Style serves as his alibi and amnesty. You feel uneasily complicit at each jolt of pleasure his prose delivers, each arch allusion you pursue, each double-entendre you decode. Yes, his language is foully fallen—and it pulls the reader down with it.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:

Last month, a team of scientists announced what could prove to be an enormous step forward in the fight against H.I.V. Scientists at Scripps Research Institute said they had developed an artificial antibody that, once in the blood, grabbed hold of the virus and inactivated it. The molecule can eliminate H.I.V. from infected monkeys and protect them from future infections. But this treatment is not a vaccine, not in any ordinary sense. By delivering synthetic genes into the muscles of the monkeys, the scientists are essentially re-engineering the animals to resist disease. Researchers are testing this novel approach not just against H.I.V., but also Ebola, malaria, influenza and hepatitis. “The sky’s the limit,” said Michael Farzan, an immunologist at Scripps and lead author of the new study. Dr. Farzan and other scientists are increasingly hopeful that this technique may be able to provide long-term protection against diseases for which vaccines have failed. The first human trial based on this strategy — called immunoprophylaxis by gene transfer, or I.G.T. — is underway, and several new ones are planned.

…I.G.T. is altogether different from traditional vaccination. It is instead a form of gene therapy. Scientists isolate the genes that produce powerful antibodies against certain diseases and then synthesize artificial versions. The genes are placed into viruses and injected into human tissue, usually muscle. The viruses invade human cells with their DNA payloads, and the synthetic gene is incorporated into the recipient’s own DNA. If all goes well, the new genes instruct the cells to begin manufacturing powerful antibodies. The idea for I.G.T. emerged during the fight against H.I.V. In a few people, it turned out, some antibodies against H.I.V. turn out to be extremely potent. So-called broadly neutralizing antibodies can latch onto many different strains of the virus and keep them from infecting new cells.

More here.

Craig Raine at The New Statesman:

Here are some chairs I noticed. An empty chair at the natural optical centre of Degas’s Dance Foyer of the Opera at rue le Peletier (1872), occupied by a fan and a puddle of white cloth. It is waiting – and the viewer is waiting, subliminally – for its occupant to return and claim the fan. It is reserved. Someone has bagged it. Not a circumstance you often see painted, though common enough in real life. Nor is the violinist playing. He is pausing, his bow at rest on his trouser leg. Degas has painted a pause. A thing that hasn’t been painted before. In the same picture, a dancer to the right, in the foreground, is sitting on another chair, her legs stiffly out front – ungainly yet graceful, resting. The upright back of the chair is invisible because it is under her unmanageably stiff tulle skirt, lifting the skirt up and slightly out of alignment. All her fatigue is there in the mistake, the carelessness of her plonking down. (The tulle in this picture, by the way, is a miracle: done not in the easier pastel, with its naturally smudgy, suggestive cloudiness, but in oil paint, using the texture of the fine linen canvas.)

Degas’s Ballet Class (circa 1880) has a little old lady in the foreground reading a folded newspaper. Her straw hat has a band of feathers, leaving the crown exposed, to parallel the bald spot of the dancing master. Her paper has a flap hanging down that mirrors the main dancer’s open scissor legs. So, cleverly composed, then, but I want to draw your attention to the way the old lady is sitting on her chair.

more here.

Ethan Iverson at Threepenny Review:

Classical music is often bedeviled by the simple question “How do you make an audience truly engaged without pandering?” Peter Sellars’s staging of the St. Matthew Passion was one of most successful answers I’ve ever seen.

Part of the magic was how local everything was. The Berlin Philhar-monic is surely one of the most august organizations in the world, but there they were, right down the steps from us, looking a bit uncomfortable. They even sounded uncomfortable at times: the viola da gamba seemed a bit raw and out of tune, the violin obbligato for the the famous aria “Erbarme dich, Mein Gott” was determinedly ahead of the beat. The first night the final chorus of part one, “O Mensch,” was out of sync in a way closer to Charles Ives than Bach. On the second night, the orchestra played a cue before the Evangelist was in place and had to restart. Probably they were just momentarily wrong-footed by the pauses built in by Sellars: in any other production of St. Matthew, the continuo plays everything more or less right on the heels of the previous event. At the Armory, we waited to see what would happen next.

more here.

Breandán Mac Suibhne at the Dublin Review of Books:

And so it was that some four or five generations came of age around Glenties and Castlederg, Ballyconnell, Ballinamore, Boyle, and Crossmolina dreaming of places like Summit Hill, Mauch Chunk and Wilkes-Barre, Hazleton, Tamaqua, Pottsville and Plymouth.

Those names were whispered into the late twentieth century. As a child, in the 1970s, I heard some of them. Put to bed in my grandparents’ house outside Ardara, there were white-matted studio photographs of three handsome young men in big black wooden frames at the foot of the bed. The only other pictures on the walls of that house were the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the colour snap on the moon-phase calendar which Tommy Tom gave out every Christmas to advertise the Greenhouse Bar and Shop. The framed photographs had been shipped home from Pennsylvania and California in the early 1900s. The handsome men were elder brothers of my grandfather, Néillí Sweeney (1900-’86). He, the youngest of the family, never saw one of those brothers, and another he had no recollection of having seen. The brother whom he did not remember seeing was James, who died, aged twenty seven, after an operation on a sarcoma of the neck in the Mercy Hospital, Wilkes-Barre, in 1909. It was the same hospital, run by Irish nuns, where Con Carbon had died two years earlier. After stints in Scotland in his teens and early twenties, James had left for the hard coal fields in 1903, stopping with an uncle in Plymouth and going down the mines.

more here.

Read the full transcript here. Or just watch:

Elliott Colla in Informed Comment:

It is fair to say that most elites in the West (and elsewhere) tend to think of historical artifacts in terms of the sacred. We may not call the things that museums collect “holy” but they are sacrosanct in our minds. This is evidenced in the way we present them (literally, on pedestals and under lights arranged just so), and the way we seek to preserve and protect them.

As Carol Duncan has argued, being able to appreciate these artifacts is a mark of education and culture among modern elite cultures. It does not matter really whether one appreciates them as a scholar or archaeologist (for what they can tell us about history), or an aficionado (for their craft or aesthetic accomplishment) or as an amateur or tourist (who just likes the experience of viewing them). The social effect of appreciation is the same: to borrow from the work of Pierre Bourdieu, it is crucial for making social distinctions. Those who appreciate the value of such objects are civilized. Those who do not appreciate their value are barbarians.

It was not always this way. People used to venerate objects as sacred not on the ground of taste or science, but because they had an attachment to something that was holy — a person, a saint, a prophet, an event. In the past, there was no such thing as a universally venerated object — for the simple reason that, for instance, while Christians might venerate the objects that pertained to their narratives of the divine, Jews or Muslims would venerate other objects that pertained their narratives.

More here.

Common in the US, rare in Europe and now championed in Africa, male circumcision is hotly debated. Jessica Wapner explores whether the gains are worth the loss.

Jessica Wapner in Mosaic:

The tomb of Ankhmahor, a high-ranking official in ancient Egypt, is situated in a vast burial ground just outside Cairo. A picture of a man standing upright is carved into one of the walls. His hands are restrained, and another figure kneels in front of him, holding a tool to his penis. Though there is no definitive explanation of why circumcision began, many historians believe this relief, carved more than four thousand years ago, is the oldest known record of the procedure.

The best-known circumcision ritual, the Jewish ceremony of brit milah, is also thousands of years old. It survives to this day, as do others practised by Muslims and some African tribes. But American attitudes to circumcision have a much more recent origin. As medical historian David Gollaher recounts in his bookCircumcision: A History of the World’s Most Controversial Surgery, early Christian leaders abandoned the practice, realising perhaps that their religion would be more attractive to converts if surgery wasn’t required. Circumcision disappeared from Christianity, and the secular Western cultures that descended from it, for almost two thousand years.

Then came the Victorians. One day in 1870, a New York orthopaedic surgeon named Lewis Sayre was asked to examine a five-year-old boy suffering from paralysis of both legs.

More here.

“Dainty footwear turns a young lady into an
altogether more beautiful creature . . .”
…………………— Etiquette for Ladies – Eliza Sell

Sow

Trottering down the oss road in me new hooves
I’m farmyardy sweet, fresh from the filth
of straw an’ swill, the trembly-leg sniff
of the slaughter wagon. A guzzler, gilt.
Trollopy an’ canting. Root yer tongue beneath
me frock an’ gulp the brute stench of the sty.

I’ve stopped denying meself: nibbling
grateful as a pet on baby-leaves, afeared
of the glutton of belly an’ rump. I’ve sunk
an when lads howd out opples on soft city palms
I guttle an’ spit, for I need a mon
wi’ a body like a trough of tumbly slop
to bury me snout in.

All them saft years of hiding at ’ome
then prancing like a pony for some sod to bridle
an’ shove down the pit, shying away
from ’is dirty fists. All them nights,
me eyes rolling white in the dark when the sow I am
was squailin an’ biting to gerrout.

Now no mon dare scupper me,
nor fancy-arse bints, for I’ve kicked the fence
an’ I’m riling on me back in the muck,
out of me mind wi’ grunting pleasure,
trotters pointing to the heavens like chimdey pots,
sticking V to the cockerel
prissy an’ crowing on ’is high church spire.

by Liz Berry
from Black Country
Publisher: Chatto & Windus, London, 2014
____________________________________________

Note:

Black Country : Standard
oss road : street
gilt : sow
canting : cheeky or saucy
guttle : chew
mon : man
saft : foolish
squailin : squealing or crying
bints : derogatory slang for girls

François Van Bastelaer in Lensculture:

New York is a wonderful place, so many times showed in pictures. I try to present the city from a different point of view. I developed a project that shows the reality as something unusual, different, sometimes almost surrealist. All these pictures are the exact reality. The use of photoshop is very low (cropping, upside-down, perhaps densifying the colors). All the pictures you see here have been existing! At one moment, on a unique place from a specific perspective, but they are a piece of reality. It's the first of my projects about reflections.

NOTE: We discovered this great work when François Van Bastelaer submitted some of these photos to the LensCulture Exposure Awards. Even though the international jury did not select the submission as an award winner, the editors of LensCulture liked the work so much, that we decided to write a feature article about it and post it to Facebook, as well. Enjoy!

More here.

Rohini Mohan in Yahoo News India (h/t Chapati Mystery):

In the last week of February, the first week of Parliament’s summer session, Delhi was festooned with protest. Men in white dhotis and women in several colors of bright marched around the roads, emerging like spokes from Mandi House, finally settling on Parliament Street. Their banners said “Kisan hai Bharat ka anna daata” (The farmer is India’s food provider). When the crowd chanted this, the words ‘kisan’ and ‘Bharat’ were the most emphatic. Farmers’ unions led the protest, joined by fishermen and laborers from villages in Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, Tamil Nadu, Assam, Punjab, Haryana, Chhattisgarh, Kerala, and West Bengal…All of them demanded the removal of the Narendra Modi government’s Land Ordinance promulgated last year, which amended the existing Land Acquisition Act, so that governments can acquire land for certain “important national projects” without seeking consent from the person who owns it…

Because several armchair commentators on TV and social media claimed that the protestors were “ignorant” and unaware of what they were opposing, I walked around the protest arena asking one simple question: What have you come here to protest? Sometimes, I followed it with two other questions: Where are you from, and have you had personal losses? In their answers, the protestors were cynical, upset, exhausted, and enraged, but most of all, they were informed.

“The compensation might still be four times the market value,” says Bhagwat Singh from Sambal, Uttar Pradesh, referring to the unchanged compensation clause that those favorable to the ordinance highlight as a good deal that makes the amendment a win-win for both corporates and farmers. “But if you give me no say, and add that even my fertile multi-crop field can be acquired, and not only for dams and power plants but also for factories where I’ll never be employed, then this is a raw deal for me, no?”

Read the full piece here.

Neel Mukherjee in New Statesman:

Classical Indian literary tradition is dizzyingly multicultural and multilingual. The vastness of the subcontinent and the number of peoples and languages it contains ensured this plurality. Administratively, too, a state of multum in parvo prevailed: successions of empires and dynasties only ever managed to rule limited (if large) parts, leaving autonomous regions under different powers. No one empire before the central Asian clan that came to be known in the 16th century as the Mughals managed to bring far-flung areas under a centralised administration and local societies continued to exist even under their expanding rule.

From around the beginning of the Common Era for a millennium, Sanskrit held a long, unbroken sway as the language of power and culture before being contested by vernacular languages. Knowledge of Sanskrit would certainly unlock a large quantity of classical Indian literature for modern readers but – as with Europe and Latin – it is possessed by only a select few. Yet Sanskrit allowed Prakrit languages, the “natural” or informal languages, to flourish in a way that, over time, gave them enough power, complexity and confidence to overthrow it as the language of literary production.

More here.

Thomas B. Edsall in the New York Times:

Larry Summers, who withdrew his candidacy for the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve under pressure from the liberal wing of the Democratic Party in 2013, has emerged as the party’s dominant economic policy strategist. The former Treasury secretary’s evolving message has won over many of his former critics.

Summers’s ascendance is a reflection of the abandonment by much of the party establishment of neo-liberal thinking, premised on the belief that unregulated markets and global trade would produce growth beneficial to worker and C.E.O. alike.

Summers’s analysis of current economic conditions suggests that free market capitalism, as now structured, is producing major distortions. These distortions, in his view, have resulted in gains of $1 trillion annually to those at the top of the pyramid, and losses of $1 trillion every year to those in the bottom 80 percent.

At a Feb. 19 panel discussion on the future of work organized by the Hamilton Project, a centrist Democratic think tank, Summers defied economic orthodoxy. He dismissed as “whistling past the graveyard” the widely accepted view that improving education and job training is the most effective way to reduce joblessness.

More here.

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Carl Zimmer in the New York Times:

T. Ryan Gregory’s lab at the University of Guelph in Ontario is a sort of genomic menagerie, stocked with creatures, living and dead, waiting to have their DNA laid bare. Scorpions lurk in their terrariums. Tarantulas doze under bowls. Flash-frozen spiders and crustaceans — collected by Gregory, an evolutionary biologist, and his students on expeditions to the Arctic — lie piled in beige metal tanks of liquid nitrogen. A bank of standing freezers holds samples of mollusks, moths and beetles. The cabinets are crammed with slides splashed with the fuchsia-stained genomes of fruit bats, Siamese fighting fish and ostriches.

Gregory’s investigations into all these genomes has taught him a big lesson about life: At its most fundamental level, it’s a mess. His favorite way to demonstrate this is through what he calls the “onion test,” which involves comparing the size of an onion’s genome to that of a human. To run the test, Gregory’s graduate student Nick Jeffery brought a young onion plant to the lab from the university greenhouse. He handed me a single-edged safety razor, and then the two of us chopped up onion stems in petri dishes. An emerald ooze, weirdly luminous, filled my dish. I was so distracted by the color that I slashed my ring finger with the razor blade, but that saved me the trouble of poking myself with a syringe — I was to supply the human genome. Jeffery raised a vial, and I wiped my bleeding finger across its rim. We poured the onion juice into the vial as well and watched as the green and red combined to produce a fluid with both the tint and viscosity of maple syrup.

More here.