Cathleen Schine reviews Levels of Life by Julian Barnes, in the New York Review of Books:
It is, not surprisingly, a marvel of flickering Barnesian leitmotifs, none of them subtle, all of them subtly and unexpectedly intertwined. Barnes’s language is even more disciplined than usual. He has managed to tenderly expose the grief of mourning in all its naked, writhing confusion, without exposing himself, something of a miracle of restraint.
More here.
The Hitch died two years ago today and we miss him. I am reposting Morgan's remembrance which was published here soon after Christopher Hitchens died:
by Morgan Meis
The first time I met Christopher Hitchens was at a Harper's Magazine Christmas party just before the start of the Iraq War. Bloomberg had recently banned smoking in New York City and the intellectuals were pissed. In those days, Harper's parties happened down in the basement at Pravda. It was all very arch. Smoking ban be damned. Lewis Lapham and his band of merry lit boys were going to light up the smokes anyway. Hitch had a Scotch in one hand and a cigarette in the other. But you've seen him like that a thousand times, in person, in pictures, on TV. I stood in line to speak with him. The line was moving smoothly until a woman in a red dress half a size too small for all her stuff gummed up the works. You could hear the collective groan all along the line as she stepped up to the Hitch. This was going to take a while.
I gave him a copy of a review a friend and I had written about his recently published book, Letters to a Young Contrarian. The book is not very good, a fact he readily acknowledged. Really, my friend and I wrote the review to attack him for his abandonment of the Left. He didn't care that we felt abandoned. Speaking with him, I came to understand that he really didn’t care. All the same, he appreciated the review, which was pretty smart. Hitch appreciated smart. Always.
More here.
Luke Muehlhauser at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute:
Luke Muehlhauser: Though you’re best known for your work in theoretical computer science, you’ve also produced some pretty interesting philosophical work, e.g. in Quantum Computing Since Democritus, “Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity,” and “The Ghost in the Quantum Turing Machine.” You also taught a fall 2011 MIT class on Philosophy and Theoretical Computer Science.
Why are you so interested in philosophy? And what is the social value of philosophy, from your perspective?
From my perspective, then, the best way to frame the question is not: “why be interested in philosophy?” Rather it’s: “why be interested in anything else?”
But I think the latter question has an excellent answer. A crucial thing humans learned, starting around Galileo’s time, is that even if you’re interested in the biggest questions, usually the only way to make progress on them is to pick off smaller subquestions: ideally, subquestions that you can attack using math, empirical observation, or both.
More here.
Ian Sample in The Guardian:
Randy Schekman, a US biologist who won the Nobel prize in physiology or medicine this year and receives his prize in Stockholm on Tuesday, said his lab would no longer send research papers to the top-tier journals, Nature, Cell and Science.
Schekman said pressure to publish in “luxury” journals encouraged researchers to cut corners and pursue trendy fields of science instead of doing more important work. The problem was exacerbated, he said, by editors who were not active scientists but professionals who favoured studies that were likely to make a splash.
The prestige of appearing in the major journals has led the Chinese Academy of Sciences to pay successful authors the equivalent of $30,000 (£18,000). Some researchers made half of their income through such “bribes”, Schekman said in an interview.
Writing in the Guardian, Schekman raises serious concerns over the journals' practices and calls on others in the scientific community to take action.
“I have published in the big brands, including papers that won me a Nobel prize. But no longer,” he writes. “Just as Wall Street needs to break the hold of bonus culture, so science must break the tyranny of the luxury journals.”
More here.
Reading List
Later on, after the dishwasher is filled,
dog walked, mail posted, magazines sorted,
bed/some semblance of sense/a few calls made:
………………………….doctor, chimney guy, Blue Cross Blue Shield
I’ll free up a spare moment to add
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt to the list
of books read I’ve kept these past few years
a satisfying snap for every entry
like biting down on a marrow bone like
………………………….breaking a seized nut with an offset wrench.
I will resist the urge to record my
college textbooks, titles long forgotten
save for orphaned words such as Issues and
Contemporary. I won’t include those
T.V. Guides with their Byzantine layout
and Lilliput font or the stack of Hardy
adventures wolfed down like salty snacks.
………………………….Christ the Readers Digests’ alone would
require their own special section,
back issues from 1961
moldering swollen during those sultry
Tennessee summers, a sage piece by
Art Linkletter or Laughter Is The Best
Medicine to while away the still
afternoon’s, relieved only by the bleat
of the front porch swing and the X-ray buzz
of cicadas.
………………………….Maybe the laundry and the fallen leaves
won’t mind if I take five minutes to add
Franklin E. Meyer’s Me and Caleb and
The Borrowers, by Mary Norton
reminding me, how could I forget? of
E.B. White, Mark Twain and Marvel Comics
not to mention countless cereal
boxes, album jackets and the liner
notes concealed within. But reading the dogs
face, a forlorn sphinx haunting an empty
bowl, I think I’d best add her name first
………………………….hoping to avoid a bloody awful
savaging when she writes her memoirs.
.
by Dave Hardin
from Scrum, December 2013
From Smithsonian:
The project, part of her master’s thesis at London’s Royal College of Art, began in 2007 when Soares came across research on bees and their phenomenal olfactory abilities. After talking to researchers in the field, she learned that certain diseases, such as lung cancer, noticeably alter the composition of bodily fluids, producing odorous compounds that show up in urine and sometimes blood. Some investigators have even been experimenting with various sensory methods to home in on these “biomarkers.” In Philadelphia, for instance, scientists have trained mice to identify the scent of lung cancer. Trained dogs have also been used to sniff out ovarian cancer. Others have focused on replicating these animal abilities in electronic nose devices that are calibrated to pick up these biomarkers undetectable to human noses.
More here.
Lucy Beresford in The Telegraph:
Above all, what The Shadow of the Crescent Moon captures so well is not just the trauma of war, but also the conflicts of contemporary Pakistanis, torn between remaining faithful to the legacy of previous generations, and their own dreams of choosing their own destiny.
More here.
Julian Barnes in The Guardian:
…Stoner was published in 1965, and – as is usually the case – it steered a mid‑course between the novelist's fears and his hopes. It was respectably reviewed; it had a reasonable sale; it did not become a bestseller; it went out of print. In 1972, Augustus, Williams's “Roman” novel, won half the National Book Award for fiction (the other half going to John Barth's Chimera). It was his largest moment of public success, yet he did not even attend the ceremony; perhaps he was rightly suspicious, as the laudatum pronounced in his absence was strangely disparaging. When he died, two decades later, without publishing any more fiction, the New York Times obituarist treated him as much as a poet and “educator” as a novelist. But still to come was that factor – identified by Williams in his letter – that novelists often write about, that they fear, but also place their trust in: time. And time has vindicated him way beyond his own modest hope. Fifty years after Williams wrote to his agent, Stoner became a bestseller. A quite unexpected bestseller. A bestseller across Europe. A bestseller publishers themselves could not quite understand. A bestseller of the purest kind – one caused almost entirely by word-of-mouth among readers.
More here. (Note: Read it, loved it, gave it to many friends who loved it. It is the male version of Madame Bovary. Do read it.)
John Paul Rollert reviews Jack Russell Weinstein's Adam Smith's Pluralism: Rationality, Education and the Moral Sentiments, in the LA Review of Books:
FRETTING, PERHAPS, for the fate of his own work, Jorge Luis Borges described the tendency of time to denude and adulterate a careful architecture of ideas. “There is no intellectual exercise that is not ultimately pointless,” he said. “A philosophical doctrine is, at first, a plausible description of the universe; the years go by, and it is a mere chapter — if not a paragraph or proper noun — in the history of philosophy.”
This is not the destiny of marginal minds, but the lot of first-rate philosophers like Kant, Heidegger, and Rawls. The Categorical Imperative, Dasein, and Veil of Ignorance are all bywords for a broader vision, one that many of us feel we should know something about but which few of us will ever bother to investigate in any detail.
There are worse fates. Consider Adam Smith. His philosophy — indeed, the fact he was a philosopher — has been obscured by the “invisible hand.” That phrase occurs just three times in his entire corpus and only once in his most famous work, The Wealth of Nations. Nevertheless, it has become a symbol for the “caricaturish libertarian” whose philosophy (if we may call it that) has supplanted the “holistic picture of human agency” Smith spent his adult life describing.
Or so says Jack Russell Weinstein in a remarkable new book, Adam Smith’s Pluralism: Rationality, Education, and the Moral Sentiments. The title is most telling for what it omits. Smith is best known as the founding father of modern economics. More than two centuries after his death, he is still celebrated for establishing a “free-market paradigm,” as Alan Greenspan put it in a 2005 lecture in Kirkcaldy, Scotland, Smith’s birthplace, that “remains applicable to this day.”
Of course, it wasn’t long before the former Fed chair had to acknowledge that the applicability of that paradigm was a bit more limited. In the fall of 2008, with the financial crisis in full bloom, the dean of deregulation famously confessed to the House Oversight Committee that there was a “flaw” in the “ideology” he presumed to share with Smith. The belief that “free, competitive markets are by far the unrivaled way to organize economies” and that attempts to regulate them were unnecessary because they had never “meaningfully worked” warranted an amendment. Free markets, Greenspan conceded occasionally needed fixing.
More here.
Katherine Rowland interviews Daniel Bergner in Guernica:
Guernica: In the book, you reference a quote by the British gynecologist William Acton, who wrote in the Victorian era: “The majority of women, happily for society, are not very much troubled by sexual feeling of any kind.” The message there being that women’s sexuality, if unleashed, could upend civilization. Times have changed, but your book suggests that elements of that logic persist.
Daniel Bergner: If we cast back to Victorian times as they’re encapsulated in that Acton quotation, we see this really severe denial of women’s desire, and that denial is mixed in with a level of fear. That carries forward to our society. Women’s sexuality surrounds us, but right beneath that there’s this other standard for women’s desire that’s still informed by uneasiness. It’s linked, ultimately, to the comfort that we all get—men and society as a whole—from this idea that women are somehow less desiring than men. We can still lean on women a little bit to keep society stable. The dichotomy that’s set up is that men are animals and anarchic in their lust and women are civilized and civilizing in their sexuality.
Guernica: This assumption that women’s sexuality exerts a civilizing force seems to even carry over into the efforts to develop a female Viagra. You write about researchers concerned that the pills they’re developing might be too powerful.
Daniel Bergner: To be clear, the FDA isn’t going to talk to me and say, “We’re going to consider rejecting a drug because it had too strong an effect and would create a generation of nymphomaniacs.” But it was the drug companies themselves that were worried that if the effects were too strong, the FDA might reject them on those grounds. Was I surprised that those conversations were happening inside the drug companies? Yes, I was staggered.
More here.
John Rockwell at The New York Times:Whenever a generous collection of correspondence like “The Leonard Bernstein Letters” appears, one rejoices, but sadly. People still write one another, though usually through electronic and social media that discourage leisurely soul-searching or digressions. Lenny was lucky he didn’t live later, or we’d have “The Leonard Bernstein Tweets.”
“Letters are impossible,” Bernstein once complained to Aaron Copland, but that hardly stopped him from writing them. Most of the letters here offer glimpses of his personality rather than insights into his compositions or conducting. There is some of that, as in exchanges with David Diamond, Marc Blitzstein, John Cage and Gunther Schuller. Yet despite discussions with collaborators like Jerome Robbins, Arthur Laurents and Stephen Sondheim, this is hardly a latter-day version of the Strauss-Hofmannsthal correspondence, which remains the ultimate depiction of a long-distance working relationship. Bernstein’s subjects offer more about love and affection and concert triumphs than deep insights. They open up a window into his dazzling personality and his close relations with an expansive range of friends, and a smaller circle of truly close friends, often dating back to his youth (Copland, Adolph Green, the producer David Oppenheim, the orchestrator Sid Ramin and more), and, above all, family.
more here.
What about Swift? Gulliver’s Travels can be read in many different ways: as local satire (on particular political circumstances and scientific fashions), as parody of the kind of pseudo-realistic travel narrative represented by Crusoe, as mockery of utopian visions, as the misanthropic ravings of a furious old man. Three hundred years on, scholars and students still debate whether or not Swift the narrator is directing his irony against Gulliver or the talking horses known as Houyhnhnms (all you need to do is whinny). Or both. The fact the name Gulliver contains the word “gull” – someone who is easily deceived – is a starting point.
We cannot begin to give decent answers to the questions raised by Gulliver’s Travels without a sense of its place in Jonathan Swift’s long and complicated life, which lasted from 1667 (probably) to 1745 (by which time he had already written his own epitaph, the magnificently self-knowing and wittily self-deprecatory Verses on the Death of Dr Swift). The Harvard professor Leo Damrosch’s new biography is to be warmly welcomed. Up until now, the serious student of Swift has had to rely on Irvin Ehrenpreis’s three-volume epic treatment, completed half a century ago. As Damrosch shows in a crisp and exemplary prologue, Ehrenpreis, for all his command of minutiae, was unnecessarily dismissive of certain items of contemporary gossip about Swift and over-confident in his psychoanalytic interpretations.
more here.
Even before the mobilisation orders had been dispatched and the declarations of war issued in late July and early August 1914, the forthcoming conflict had been invested with moral significance. Following the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, in Sarajevo on June 28th, Austro-Hungarian diplomats framed Serbia as a criminal state. “We have no plans for conquest,” Oskar von Montlong, the head of the ministry of foreign affairs press bureau told a leading newspaper editor, “we only want to punish the criminals and protect the peace of Europe.” Serbian diplomats framed their defence in legal and moral terms, promising to extradite any of their citizens who were proved to have been complicit in the assassination. They also reminded the European public that Serbia had made concessions during the Balkan Wars in 1912 and 1913 in the “exclusive interest of European peace”. What it meant to be European was at the core of the First World War, as each side sought to bend conceptions of the continent to its own national interest. Raw talk of the reason of state, ungarnished by a wider political sensibility, was surprisingly rare in a war in which states struggled for their very existence. Power was constituted not only by military force, but also by ideas, ideas that would inform the future settlement of Europe.
more here.
From The New York Times:
The first ever Lahore Literary Festival — not because it was the largest such festival in the world, or the most star-studded, and not because festivals are in and of themselves always good things, but rather because, at the sight of its 800-seat main auditorium filled repeatedly beyond capacity, every stair and aisle occupied in the giddiest breach of fire safety, and with so many hundreds more keen but unable to squeeze into this or that talk, most of them half my age or younger, I began to think that, laments to the contrary notwithstanding, the ranks of readers are in fact growing, in Pakistan and I suspect across Asia and Africa, and that this is a wonderful development, worth our taking a minute to cheer.
— Mohsin Hamid
Earlier this year, in a 6,400-word newspaper essay taken from his book “The Kraus Project,” Jonathan Franzen set out some of his objections to — and anxieties about — Internet culture. The article was many things: angry, mournful, brilliant, occasionally dotty. The widespread mockery it received was only depressingly crude. For the sin of casting doubt on the Truth and Beauty of Twitter, Franzen was swiftly branded a Luddite, an elitist, a pretentious old fart and a misogynist. The yakkers, braggers and bullies did themselves proud.
— Zoë Heller
More here.
Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:
Michelangelo chose to make David — the giant-killer — into a giant himself. Mostly this has to do with accidents of history and dumb luck. There was a huge piece of marble lying around Florence in the 15th century. A couple of sculptors had tried to make a statue of it. But the block was tricky to work with, so tall and thin. No artist was yet up to the task. In 1501, Michelangelo, 26 years old at the time, said he could do the job. He promised to bring David out of the marble.
David was a special figure for Florentines. This was Italy during the Renaissance: a collection of city-states and principalities usually at war with one another. This was a time of warrior popes and family feuds that killed hundreds. The people of Florence wanted to see themselves in David. Florence was the little city that could stand up to all the others. Plus, Florence had the powerful banking family, the Medici, to deal with. The Medici were always threatening to dominate Florence, economically and politically. In the late 15th century, the city kicked the Medici out of Florence. Defying the Medici was another David-like act. Problem was, the Medici had already commissioned a sculpture of David. That’s the famous statue by Donatello. With the ousting of the Medici, the people of Florence wanted to commission their own David. They wanted to take back the symbol for themselves.
So, Michelangelo solved two problems at once. He solved the technical problem of making a giant sculpture out of a giant block of marble. And he solved the problem of political symbols by creating a statue so overwhelming to behold that David would forever be associated with the Republic of Florence. The irony is that Michelangelo had learned to sculpt under the patronage of the Medici family, but his most famous work was a repudiation of their claims over the city.
More here.
Sandaraa is a new band from Lahore, Pakistan and Brooklyn, New York. The group is fronted by vocalist Zeb Bangash (Zeb and Haniya) and features Brooklyn musicians Michael Winograd on clarinet, Eylem Basaldi on violin, Patrick Farrell on accordion, Yoshie Fruchter on guitar, Benjy Fox-Rosen on bass and drummer Richie Barshay. Sandaraa explores a vast repertoire of South Asian material (from Balochistan, Afghanistan and beyond,) while blending it with the sounds of Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and more.
Zara Khadeeja Majoka in The Friday Times:
There is a bomb blast at Cantt Station and rippling out of it is this novel narrated in a myriad of voices: the brother of a shell-shocked ambulance driver, a child with protruding teeth, a car-snatching thug, a writer, a horny teenager, a middle aged entrepreneur writing a book to win his son back, a child who thrives on stories from his elder sister, a young cartoonist. All of these interconnected characters come on stage to give us their stories and the resonance of their multiple voices reveals a faint light of reason amidst unreason, excavates new forms of congruence amidst incongruity.
More here.
