First, Jonathan Franzen in The Guardian with a piece generating some interesting responses:

Karl Kraus was an Austrian satirist and a central figure in fin-de-siecle Vienna's famously rich life of the mind. From 1899 until his death in 1936, he edited and published the influential magazine Die Fackel(The Torch); from 1911 onward, he was also the magazine's sole author. Although Kraus would probably have hated blogs, Die Fackelwas like a blog that everybody who mattered in the German-speaking world, from Freud to Kafka to Walter Benjamin, found it necessary to read and have an attitude toward. Kraus was especially well known for his aphorisms – for example, “Psychoanalysis is that disease of the mind for which it believes itself to be the cure” – and at the height of his popularity he drew thousands to his public readings.

The thing about Kraus is that he's very hard to follow on a first reading – deliberately hard. He was the scourge of throwaway journalism, and to his cult-like followers his dense and intricately coded style formed an agreeable barrier to entry; it kept the uninitiated out. Kraus himself remarked of the playwright Hermann Bahr, before attacking him: “If he understands one sentence of the essay, I'll retract the entire thing.” If you read Kraus's sentences more than once, you'll find that they have a lot to say to us in our own media-saturated, technology-crazed, apocalypse-haunted historical moment.

More here. Next, Fiona Duncan and Sarah Nicole Prickett in New Inquiry:

Chris Kraus’d lovers Fiona Duncan and Sarah Nicole Prickett were on Twitter, debating the latest instance of an old man yelling at iCloud — a 5,000-word screed against Apple, Amazon, Twitter, smartphones, self-promotion, Jennifer Weiner, poor people, young people, elderly German women, and “the ‘dehumanisation’ of a wedding” — when one of us, doesn’t matter who, decided we should cunt up the text, replacing every quoting of and reference to Karl Kraus with, well, see below.

***

“The only way I’d gotten any meetings in Rotterdam or the Cinemarket two years before had been by getting drunk and flirting with an ex-philosopher turned producer by telling him I was the grand-niece of the satirist Karl Kraus.”

– Chris Kraus, Aliens & Anorexia

Chris Kraus was an American stripper and a central figure in fin-de-siecle New York‘s famously rich life of the mind. From the late 80s on , she edited and published the influential Semiotext(e) series Native Agents; she is also an author. Although Kraus would probably have hated academic journals, Semiotext(e) was like a journal that everybody who mattered in the American-speaking world, from Acker to Baudrillard to Rosalind Krauss, found it necessary to read and have an attitude toward. Kraus wasespecially well known for her aphorisms – for example,“Reading delivers on the promise that sex raises but hardly ever can fulfill” – and at the height of her popularity she drew thousands to her public readings.

More here. Also some more comments at Crooked Timber, here and here. See Amanda Hess's comment in Slate's XX Factor here. And Jennifer Weiner, whom Franzen singles out in passing, responds here.

more here.

Andrea Scrima at The Quarterly Conversation:

After the publication in English translation of Satantango, The Melancholy of Resistance, and War and War—which together with Seiobo There Below constitute an important cross-section of Krasznahorkai’s prodigious literary output—his bleak outlook on a human history bent on calamity has become legendary. In an interview published in 2012, he expresses doubt that the human race will survive another 200 years. Regarding our collective ability to alter this course, his prognosis is less than optimistic as he calls the authority of literature itself into question: “This kind of communication is really over and done with. Its disappearance is a rather obvious process; it is happening faster at some points of the world than at others. I’m afraid this kind of literature is not sustainable.” To compound the matter, as the incessant onslaught of information fragments our attention on a daily basis, it has to be said that reading Krasznahorkai is not particularly easy, even given the seductive nature of his prose. Moreover, with Seiobo There Below, he has set himself the task of writing about something that is essentially impossible to formulate in language. We are no longer accustomed to using words like “illumination,” “transcendence,” or “epiphany”; indeed, in our secularized Western world they can sound embarrassing and even ridiculous. Yet his is a language that flows in liquid state, eddying around obstructions to form vortices of swelling thought in which the consistency can suddenly gel, become viscous—and all at once, the writing embodies precisely what it describes as these endless, spell-binding sentences gradually alter our perception and prepare us for a brief glimmer of something outside ourselves, something that can perhaps explain us to ourselves.

more here.

Ramachandra Guha at the Financial Times:

The city that really shaped Gandhi was Johannesburg, where he lived between 1903 and 1913. Following the end of the Anglo-Boer war, the gold-rich Transvaal was attracting immigrants from all over the world. Marauders and exploiters came to Johannesburg in search of wealth, eccentrics and free-spirits to escape convention or ostracism at home.

One of these dissenters was Henry Polak, a Jewish journalist sent out from London by his family in a vain attempt to thwart his relationship with a Christian socialist named Millie Graham. Gandhi first met Polak in a vegetarian restaurant; later, after Graham also came out, the couple were married with the Indian lawyer as a witness. The Gandhis and the Polaks shared a home, where fierce arguments raged about diet, religion, politics, and the respective merits of radicalism and meliorism. Another strong influence was Sonja Schlesin, his secretary. The Russian-Jewish Schlesin was an energetic feminist, who – like the Polaks – moved Gandhi away from his inherited social conservatism and patriarchy.

more here.

Melissa Katsoulis in The Telegraph:

Steve Almond in The New York Times:

When Elizabeth Gilbert was in fourth grade, her teacher, Ms. Sandie Carpenter, announced a fund-raiser. Students were asked to sell grinders — New Englandese for “sub sandwiches” — to pay for a class trip. There was never any question whether Gilbert would participate. Still, door-to-door sales of a perishable foodstuff can prove intimidating, even to a zealous 9-year-old. So her mother, Carole, initiated a training program. She made Gilbert go outside and close the front door. Gilbert then had to knock, introduce herself and explain what she was selling and why. “Our family’s going on vacation next week,” Carole might announce. “What if we want the grinders two weeks from now?” To which Gilbert would generally respond, “I don’t know!” and start crying. “Back it up,” her mother would say. “Try it again. Get it right, kid.” And close the door. They did this, Gilbert recalls, for what felt like a whole afternoon.

A decade and a half later, Gilbert took an elevator up to the offices of Spin magazine to ask for a job. Her only connection at the magazine was having met the publisher, Bob Guccione Jr., at a party once. She had no experience as a journalist — her degree from N.Y.U. was in international relations — and enough good sense to be terrified. The doors to the elevator opened. Gilbert took a deep breath. Come on, she told herself. You’re Carole Gilbert’s daughter. Go do this! The receptionist was, to put it gently, unmoved by her appeal. A concerned secretary appeared, then a personal assistant. Gilbert politely refused to budge. Guccione eventually agreed to see her but had no recollection of having met her. Look, he said finally, my assistant is going out of town for three days. You can do his job. At the end of this stint, Guccione pulled out his wallet, handed Gilbert 300 bucks and wished her good luck. Some months later, Gilbert placed her first short story in Esquire, which published it with the subtitle “the debut of an American writer.” She sent the story to Guccione with a note that read, “I told you I was a writer!” He called and offered her an assignment on the spot. The lesson was obvious. Life was just a big grinder sale. Your job was to knock on the door and not to leave until your ambitions were met.

More here.

Spring Sonnet, with my sister's favorite bit of Deborah

The way I see it, every season comes through
With a blessing—winter: dazzle; summer: evening;
Autumn: cold; and this particular spring
It's got to be you, monotonous cuckoo
Or whatever you are, blasting that major third
like a downbeat for the music of the spheres.
And who's to say it isn't, that the stars
And planets aren't guided by a bird?
You voice certainly seems to carry far
Enough, its two persistent notes so pure
They must keep the air's orchestra in tune.
Who cares if they're the same again and again?
I'll stop waiting for that new, exquisite song.
I've got two notes; even I will sing.

by Jaqueline Osherow

Ishtiaq Ahmed in The Friday Times:

Let me admit that although partitioning territory to solve disputes between adversarial nationalist movements and parties is not something I am intellectually comfortable with because it validates tribalism rather than human empathy and solidarity for building community, at times it is the only solution which is morally and practically correct. Partitioning former Sudan to let the Black Africans escape genocide at the hands of the putative Arabs of northern Sudan was an appropriate solution; East Timor getting out of the clutches of the Indonesian state has also been the best option. I hope one day the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank are liberated from brutal Israeli rule.

However, I don't think the partition of India and of Bengal and Punjab belong to the category of intractable disputes that could not have been managed through appropriate democratic arrangements. The so-called Hindu-Muslim problem that dominated politics in British India from the twentieth century onwards till it culminated in the biggest forced migration of people in history and one of the most horrific cases of genocide and ethnic cleansing- 14-18 million forced to flee and between 1-2 million killed – left large minorities in both states. The only difference being that in India the Muslim minority could stay put after some three per cent of the Muslims from Muslim-minority areas migrated to Pakistan but Hindus and Sikhs had to leave almost to the last man in Punjab and the settled areas of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. Very few could stay behind in the tribal areas and in Balochistan. It was only in interior Sindh that a community of some significance could remain behind. Not surprisingly, such upheaval bequeathed a bloody and bitter legacy of fear and hatred to India and Pakistan. The three wars and the Rann of Kutch and Kargil miniwars and constant tension along the Line of Control drawn in the former Jammu and Kashmir State has meant not only huge, wasteful expenditure on military and defence but also a profoundly vitiating impact on democracy, development and pluralism.

More here.

Colin Burrow reviews the book by Melissa Mohr in the London Review of Books:

Roll up, roll up all you ‘mangie rascals, shiteabed scoundrels, drunken roysters, slie knaves, drowsie loiterers, slapsauce fellows, slabberdegullion druggels, lubbardly lowts … fondling fops, base lowns, saucie coxcombs, idle lusks, scoffing Braggards, noddie meacocks, blockish grutnols, doddi-poljolt-heads, jobbernol goosecaps, foolish loggerheads, slutch calf-lollies, grouthead gnat-snappers, lob-dotterels, gaping changelings, codshead loobies, woodcock slangams, ninnie-hammer flycatchers, noddiepeak simpletons, turdie gut, shitten shepherds, and other suchlike defamatory epithets’. As these few tasters from Sir Thomas Urquhart’s translation of Rabelais indicate, swearing can be fun: ‘slabberdegullion druggels’ (slovenly dimbos) and ‘noddie meacocks’ (limp-wristed wimps) have the surreal energy of abuse forged in the heat. But Urquhart’s list of obscenities does gradually tail off. ‘Shitten shepherds’ is tired and formulaic. It’s time to move on. Foulness quickly becomes boring. Really good swearing relies on formulaic elements, but needs to be precisely adapted to the moment. In this respect dear old Robin in the 1960s Batman TV series was one of the best swearers, though his lips were never soiled with a common-or-garden profanity. He could combine ‘Holy’ with more or less anything in order to create his trademark ejaculations, which were always to the point. Number two in my list of all-time favourites is ‘Holy chocolate éclair!’ Number one has to be ‘Holy uncanny photographic mental processes!’

You can see how difficult it is to swear really well by asking a computer to do it. Those with masochistic tendencies might seek out the verbal rough-housing on offer from the potty-mouthed webservers at foulomatic.hnldesign.nl or the more tastily named sweary.com. The results, though, are disappointing. A true poet of the foul would never have come up with the computer’s ersatz ‘toe erection’, or its ‘son of a wank biscuit slapper’, though I confess that I had to look up ‘biscuit’ in a slang dictionary to discover its filth potential: ‘ass’ is the relevant sense, though it can apparently also function in similar ways to the British English slang use of ‘crumpet’.

More here.

Stephen M. Walt in Foreign Policy:

Why does so much of the academic writing on international affairs seem to be of little practical value, mired in a “cult of irrelevance”? Is it because IR scholars are pursuing a misleading model of “science,” patterned after physics, chemistry, or biology? Or is it because many prominent academics fear criticism and are deathly afraid of being controversial, and prefer to hide behind arcane vocabulary, abstruse mathematics, or incomprehensible postmodern jargon?

Both motivations are probably at work to some degree, but I would argue that academics are for the most part just responding to the prevailing incentive structures and metrics that are used to evaluate scholarly merit. This point is made abundantly clear in an important new article by Peter Campbell and Michael Desch of the University of Notre Dame, titled “Rank Irrelevance: How Academia Lost Its Way.” Campbell and Desch examine the methodology behind the National Research Council rankings of graduate programs in political science, and argue that the methods used are both “systematically biased” and analytically flawed.

National Research Council (NRC) rankings carry a fair bit of weight in academia. As I know from my own experience, deans, provosts, and presidents pay attention to where departments are ranked. A department chair who presides over a significant improvement in his/her department's ranking will be viewed favorably, while a decline sets off warning bells. Similarly, if a junior faculty member is up for tenure and gets an “outside offer” from a more highly ranked department, that will be taken as a strong signal of that faculty member's perceived value. By contrast, if you're up for tenure and get an offer from a department ranked further down the food chain, it will be a positive sign but not necessarily dispositive. For these and other reasons, these rankings matter.

The problem, as Campbell and Desch show, is that the rankings are seriously flawed.

More here.

Adam Shatz in The Nation:

When Sy Johnson, a jazz pianist and arranger, used to visit Charles Mingus at his apartment in the East Village in the 1960s, there was always a pot of soup on the stove, and Mingus—a gourmand who once interrupted a concert to eat a steak dinner on the bandstand—was constantly tasting it. “He would say—‘Needs another carrot.’” He would chop another carrot and taste it again, only to decide it needed an onion. The pot might simmer for a month before Mingus was satisfied with the seasoning. As Johnson tells John Goodman in Mingus Speaks, a book of interviews with Mingus and friends conducted in the early 1970s, Mingus’s music was a lot like his soup: a “huge cauldron of sounds” that was “always in a state of becoming something.”

Mingus rarely left his pieces alone when he took them on the road with his Jazz Workshop, as he began calling his bands in the mid-1950s. When the Workshop played “Fables of Faubus,” a dart of sarcasm aimed at Arkansas’s segregationist governor Orval Faubus, at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the jaunty eight-minute tune swelled into a half-hour suite, punctuated by tart allusions to “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” and “God Bless America” and a bass clarinet solo of blistering intensity by Eric Dolphy.

More here. [Thanks to Muhammad Idrees Ahmad. Photo from Wikipedia.]

From delanceyplace:

“When we say someone is 'perceptive' or 'intuitive' about people, we are unknowingly referring to their ability to read another person's body language and to compare these cues with verbal signals. In other words, when we say that we have a 'hunch' or 'gut feeling' that someone has told us a lie, we usually mean that their body language and their spoken words don't agree. This is also what speakers call 'audience awareness,' or relating to a group. For example, if an audience were sitting back in their seats with their chins down and arms crossed on their chest, a 'perceptive' speaker would get a hunch or feeling that his delivery was not going across well. …Being 'perceptive' means being able to spot the contradictions between someone's words and their body language. “Overall, women are far more perceptive than men, and this has given rise to what is commonly referred to as 'women's intuition.' Women have an innate ability to pick up and decipher nonverbal signals, as well as having an accurate eye for small details. “Research by psychologists at Harvard University showed how women are far more alert to body language than men. They showed short films, with the sound turned off, of a man and woman communicating, and the participants were asked to decode what was happening by reading the couple's expressions. The research showed that women read the situation accurately 87 percent of the time, while the men scored only 42 percent accuracy. … Female intuition is particularly evident in women who have raised children. For the first few years, the mother relies almost solely on the nonverbal channel to communicate with the child and this is why women are often more perceptive negotiators than men, because they practice reading signals early.

“Magnetic Resonance Imaging brain scans (MRI) clearly show why women have far greater capacity for communicating with and evaluating people than men do. Women have between fourteen and sixteen areas of the brain to evaluate others' behavior versus a man's four to six areas. This explains how a woman can attend a dinner party and rapidly work out the state of the relationships of other couples at the party — who's had an argument, who likes who, and so on.

More here.

Michael Duffy in The Millions:

With no mention of the titular character in it at all, critics have been squirming in their seats, unsure of what to think about the title of J.M. Coetzee’s new novel, The Childhood of Jesus. Since its publication in the UK and other English-speaking countries in March, it has become the occasion of many outpourings of critical anxiety. Rare is the occasion when someone like Christopher Taylerin the London Review of Books can feel excited about their confusion; or address it honestly as Leo Robson does in the New Statesman. More common is a scramble to make sense of the thing, like Theo Tait’s ingenious attempt in The Guardian, or the dismissal of its importance in giving the book some other framework for evaluation, as in Justin Cartwright’s otherwise interesting guide to the book for the BBC. And with the publication of the work in the U.S. we can only expect more of the same.

The problem isn’t that the title doesn’t describe what’s in the book. It’s the way it doesn’t. It’s too big a title, too grand. It describes a character who, even if he is not literally related to the character in the book — a boy named David — works on such a larger scale that it wouldn’t even work figuratively. And so even when we can’t find anything meaningful in it, it is hard to believe that Coetzee didn’t mean it to be there. It seems, in other words, indeed serious, in being a little too serious — there’s no letup, no obliqueness in it, no irony that is clear and distinguishable.

more here.

From KurzweilAI:

A new study from MIT reveals a gene that is critical to the process of memory extinction (when older memories are replaced with new experiences). Enhancing the activity of this gene, known as Tet1, might benefit people with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) by making it easier to replace fearful memories with more positive associations, says Li-Huei Tsai, director of MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory. The Tet1 gene appears to control a small group of other genes necessary for memory extinction. “If there is a way to significantly boost the expression of these genes, then extinction learning is going to be much more active,” says Tsai, the Picower Professor of Neuroscience at MIT and senior author of a paper appearing in the Sept. 18 issue of the journal Neuron. The paper’s lead authors are Andrii Rudenko, a postdoc at the Picower Institute, and Meelad Dawlaty, a postdoc at the Whitehead Institute. Tsai’s team worked with researchers in MIT biology professor Rudolf Jaenisch’s lab at the Whitehead to study mice with the Tet1 gene knocked out. Tet1 and other Tet proteins help regulate the modifications of DNA that determine whether a particular gene will be expressed or not. Tet proteins are very abundant in the brain, which made scientists suspect they might be involved in learning and memory. To their surprise, the researchers found that mice without Tet1 were perfectly able to form memories and learn new tasks. However, when the team began to study memory extinction, significant differences emerged.

To measure the mice’s ability to extinguish memories, the researchers conditioned the mice to fear a particular cage where they received a mild shock. Once the memory was formed, the researchers then put the mice in the cage but did not deliver the shock. After a while, mice with normal Tet1 levels lost their fear of the cage as new memories replaced the old ones. “What happens during memory extinction is not erasure of the original memory,” Tsai says. “The old trace of memory is telling the mice that this place is dangerous. But the new memory informs the mice that this place is actually safe. There are two choices of memory that are competing with each other.” In normal mice, the new memory wins out. However, mice lacking Tet1 remain fearful. “They don’t relearn properly,” Rudenko says. “They’re kind of getting stuck and cannot extinguish the old memory.”

More here.

Eric Banks in Bookforum:

If Franzen seems at first an unlikely vehicle for an author whose translation prospects could flummox Steiner, his rendering of Kraus immediately dispels all reservations. The Kraus Project, which reprints the German essays alongside Franzen’s translations, is a fluid version of Kraus that captures as best it might the author’s irascible precision without tinkering his prose to make it sound like any other writer’s. Franzen, one should recall, published his translation of Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening in 2007, and in his memoir The Discomfort Zone he recounted studying abroad in Germany. In some of the footnotes to The Kraus Project, he retraces that year again, a largely miserable and juvenile time of anger, confusion, and loneliness, but one at least in which the charged environment of Berlin in the early days of the Reagan administration led him to a seminar on Kraus. There, he wrestled with two of Kraus’s essays, “Heine and the Consequences” and “Nestroy and Posterity” (1912), which form the basis—along with Franzen’s sometimes meandering but mostly compelling footnoted counternarrative—of The Kraus Project. It is a curious and itself idiosyncratic document filled with a cacophony of voices, belonging mostly to Franzen and of course Kraus, but also to the novelist Kehlmann and to the scholar Paul Reitter, who annotates the thornier of references in the essays and offers his own perspective on Kraus.

more here.

Antonio Spadaro interviews the Pope in America:

I ask Pope Francis point-blank: “Who is Jorge Mario Bergoglio?” He stares at me in silence. I ask him if I may ask him this question. He nods and replies: “I ​​do not know what might be the most fitting description…. I am a sinner. This is the most accurate definition. It is not a figure of speech, a literary genre. I am a sinner.”

The pope continues to reflect and concentrate, as if he did not expect this question, as if he were forced to reflect further. “Yes, perhaps I can say that I am a bit astute, that I can adapt to circumstances, but it is also true that I am a bit naïve. Yes, but the best summary, the one that comes more from the inside and I feel most true is this: I am a sinner whom the Lord has looked upon.” And he repeats: “I ​​am one who is looked upon by the Lord. I always felt my motto, Miserando atque Eligendo [By Having Mercy and by Choosing Him], was very true for me.”

The motto is taken from the Homilies of Bede the Venerable, who writes in his comments on the Gospel story of the calling of Matthew: “Jesus saw a publican, and since he looked at him with feelings of love and chose him, he said to him, ‘Follow me.’” The pope adds: “I think the Latin gerund miserando is impossible to translate in both Italian and Spanish. I like to translate it with another gerund that does not exist: misericordiando [“mercy-ing”].

more here.

Susan Neiman in Aeon:

The German language has a word for coming to terms with past atrocities. Vergangenheitsbewältigung came into use in the 1960s to mean ‘we have to do something about our Nazi past’. Germany has spent much of the past 50 years in the excruciating process of dealing with the country’s national crimes. What does it mean to come to terms with the fact that your father, even if not a passionate Nazi, did nothing whatever to stop them, watched silently as his Jewish doctor or neighbour was deported, and shed blood in the name of their army? With very few exceptions, this was the fate of most Germans born between 1930-1960, and it isn’t a fate to be envied.

Working through Germany’s criminal past was not an abstract exercise; it involved confronting one’s own parents and teachers and calling their authority rotten. The 1960s in Germany were more turbulent than the 1960s in Paris or Prague — not to mention Berkeley — because they were focused not on crimes committed by someone in far-off Vietnam but considerably closer to home, by the people from whom one had learnt life’s earliest lessons.

More here.

Janet Maslin in the New York Times:

Anyone expecting an incisive account of Mr. Dawkins’s growth as a scientist may be surprised by the meandering path he takes here. True, his lineage is impressive, and his boyhood was uncommonly adventurous, so both warrant attention. He takes his time explaining that his great-great-great-grandparents eloped more cleverly than most couples do. Henry Dawkins and Augusta Clinton made their getaway in a coach, but not before the groom-to-be had planted half a dozen decoy coaches near Augusta’s home so that her father, Sir Henry Clinton, could not prevent the marriage. As the British commander in chief in America, he could not win the Revolutionary War, either.

The family history also includes Clinton George Augustus Dawkins, son of the eloped couple, who earned his place in family lore during the Austrian bombardment of rebel Venice in 1849, when a cannonball hit his bed.

“A cannonball penetrated the bed covers and passed between his legs, but happily did him no more than superficial damage,” reads the inscription that accompanies a cannonball in Mr. Dawkins’s possession. The story may not be 100 percent true, but it does underscore this family’s staying power.

More here.