From Salon:

When I watch the footage of the first explosion, I look at the Boston Public Library Main Branch across the street, and I think no matter who they turn out to be–Islamic jihadists, home grown militia, neo-Nazis, something else–what really scares them, what they truly hate, is the access to knowledge that building exemplifies. Youngest victim is 8. Sigh. What can you do with that? If your “CAUSE” involves the death of kids, it’s not a cause, it’s a pestilence.

So proud to be a Bostonian tonight. So brokenhearted to be one, too.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Eight years of work, thousands of researchers around the world, $1 billion spent — and finally it was done. On April 14, 2003, a decade ago this week, scientists announced that they had completed the Human Genome Project, compiling a list of the three billion letters of genetic code that make up what they considered to be a sort of everyperson’s DNA. To commemorate the anniversary, Eric D. Green, the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health, spoke about what has been accomplished, what it means and what is coming next. Our conversation has been condensed and edited.

How hard is it today to sequence a person’s genome? We can sequence a human genome in a couple of days for well under $10,000, probably around $4,000 or $5,000. And we sequence the genome you got from your father and the one you got from your mother. That’s a total of six billion bases. It is already around the cost of an M.R.I., and it will get cheaper yet. The original Human Genome Project sequenced just one representation, three billion bases.

How did it get so cheap? In April 2003, right after the completion of the human genome, our institute put into print a call for technology to deliver a $1,000 human genome sequence. That became the battle cry. I remember thinking someday we would get to a $1,000 genome. I don’t worry about the $1,000 genome anymore. We have had six orders of magnitude improvement in a decade.

What about the naysayers who asked, “Where are the cures for diseases that we were promised?” I became director of this institute three and a half years ago, and I remember when I first started going around and giving talks. Routinely I would hear: “You are seven years into this. Where are the wins? Where are the successes?” I don’t hear that as much anymore. I think what’s happening, and it has happened in the last three years in particular, is just the sheer aggregate number of the success stories. The drumbeat of these successes is finally winning people over. We are understanding cancer and rare genetic diseases. There are incredible stories now where we are able to draw blood from a pregnant woman and analyze the DNA of her unborn child. Increasingly, we have more informed ways of prescribing medicine because we first do a genetic test. We can use microbial DNA to trace disease outbreaks in a matter of hours. These are just game changers. It’s a wide field of accomplishment, and there is a logical story to be told.

More here.

Kevin Mahnken in Humanities:

“In Crime and Punishment, there is a sentence that goes like this: ‘It was a very simple matter and there was nothing complicated about it.’” Richard Pevear lets the words hang in the air, along with a note of faint bafflement. From his Paris apartment, one half of the world’s only celebrity translation team is recollecting some of the knotty, cross-lingual jumbles that he has spent his working life trying to untangle.

“I came running to Larissa”—Larissa Volokhonsky, Pevear’s wife of thirty years and collaborator on twenty-one works of Russian-to-English translation—“and said, ‘Can that be? Is that what he said?’ And she checked and said yes. ‘It was a very simple matter and there was nothing complicated about it.’” Reassured, if still skeptical, he jotted it down and moved on to Dostoyevsky’s next syntax-warping creation.

The inconspicuous passage would resurface before long, though. The translation was published and, Richard recalls, “one very eminent reviewer . . said, ‘They occasionally lapse into banalities, for instance.’ And he quotes this same sentence.” First lodged years ago, the complaint is a rare blemish on a generally worshipful public reception, perhaps tempting the duo to tidy up such repetitive, infelicitous wording. Instead, two decades and many printings later, Richard shrugs off the critic’s jibe and sticks to his guns. “But it’s unmistakable in Russian!”

“It’s very simple,” adds Larissa in her heavy Slavic accent, “so simple, I later found the same sentence in Chekhov.”

But there is nothing simple about the ongoing Pevear-Volokhonsky partnership (known widely in literary circles as PV). Their output, spilling over tens of thousands of pages and encompassing the hundred-fifty-year golden age of Russian literature, rivals even their most prolific forerunners in both quality and quantity. It is easier to list the canonical prose authors they have neglected (only Turgenev and Nabokov, though Larissa has lobbied her husband to turn their attentions to the former) than all of those they have translated. From the Patriotic War against Napoléon to the era of nineteenth-century radicalism and reform, and then on to the October Revolution, the Communist terror, and the postwar period, the Pevear-Volokhonsky project now surveys a cultural expanse as broad as the Siberian frontier.

Even their unconventional division of labor sets them apart from their contemporaries. Occupying separate rooms, husband and wife execute a two-step process that begins with Larissa’s word-for-word English rendition from the original. Richard, who speaks only basic Russian, then shapes Larissa’s special proof into literary English while rejecting anachronistic vocabulary and constructions. After hundreds of chapters, revisions, and personal consultations, the method has resulted in two prestigious PEN Translation Prizes and—as a mark of their uncommon public acceptance—a much-coveted selection to Oprah Winfrey’s juggernaut book club.

Now they have passed another important milestone. In putting their stamp on Lev Tolstoy’s final novel, Hadji Murat, they have at last reached the end of the great writer’s immense corpus.

by Dave Maier

Paul Horwich is a philosopher best known for his “minimalist” (or “deflationist”) theory of truth: that there is nothing more to the idea than that saying that something is true (“'Grass is green' is true”) is the same thing as saying it oneself (“Grass is green”). This view has met with little success, and now Horwich is dressing it in Wittgensteinian garb for resale. As marketing strategy goes, this isn't terrible – Wittgenstein's views are notoriously obscure, and his “quietism” has the same generally meta-skeptical tone as “minimalism” – but I'm not buying it, in neither the old guise nor the new.

Michael Lynch isn't buying it either. He too has a theory of truth (let's not get into it right now), and doesn't appreciate it being dismissed, not for its content, or his arguments for it, but merely for its being a “constructive” theory of truth in the first place. But it's hard to know whom to root for here, as Lynch's anti-Wittgensteinian remarks simply reprise the same trite, uncomprehending dismissals that philosopher has endured for nearly a century now. I won't have enough space here to say what Wittgenstein really meant, nor why he was right to say it; but it's important not to let these things go unchallenged.

Horwich begins by painting himself as the underdog fighting the good fight: “Apart from a small and ignored clique of hard-core supporters the usual view these days is that his writing is self-indulgently obscure and that behind the catchy slogans there is little of intellectual value.”

This is too stark a picture, not to mention a bit self-serving. It's not that there isn't such a clique, or such harsh rejection; but I'd identify at least two further gradations between idolatry and contemptuous dismissal. First, many mainstream philosophers recognize Wittgenstein's contributions, even without accepting (or understanding) his conclusions. More to the point, you don't have to be a “hard-core supporter” to share Wittgenstein's general attitude toward the tendencies in philosophy he objects to. I for one would be perfectly happy to leave Wittgenstein out of it entirely if I could get what I wanted some other way. But there are some things we need that only he gives us.

After some throat-clearing, Horwich boils his Wittgenstein down into four main claims (for elaboration see his recent book on the subject).

1. Philosophy is “scientistic” in aiming at “simple, general principles”.

Such principles, I take it, are fine for science, where no one is complaining about the abstract generality of, say, Newton's laws. But philosophy is not science. I'd agree with this part, except to point out that philosophy was aiming at such principles long before science came along. In fact science as we know it developed from what we used to call “natural philosophy”. More important than labels, though, is the fact that there's nothing wrong with either simplicity or generalization if they're properly understood.

Read more »

In Haifa you avoided testing the imagination in the room where it had trained you to step out of yourself. You were content with observing, like a bird watching a feather clinging to the bitter orange tree. — Mahmoud Darwish [1

By Sousan Hammad

The emphasis of this text is to discuss the role that the imaginary plays in poetry that is rooted in both a geographic place and virtual (poetic) space, arguing that the poem, in its poetic imaginary, is an attempt to become a place that exists in its displacement. By using images that create an imaginary representation of a space it enables spectators to see the possible variations of a place. In so doing, it will aim to serve as an archive of an imaginary Haifa, creating a platform to collectively rethink and reimagine our experiences with Palestine, a challenge that maps multiplicities: those experiences and feelings in a particular space that are totally unknown or ‘unreal' to some readers, or actual and ideal to others.

“The Breast” by Rene Magritte, 1961

Still, no physical reality of Palestine can ever take the place of the mythic place that was lost. The liturgy of longing for Palestine, for a lost time and space, has become a tired and clichéd phenomenon (as the traditions of memorializing have proved) for its diasporic, exiled, and refugee communities. Rather than end the reaction to longing, rethinking nostalgia and the force of roles, such as the imaginary, can be understood as modes for provoking liberation from the ‘what has been' and ‘what is'. It is a break from clichés and manifestos, a way to cope with the obsession of the Palestine question that every Palestinian struggles with. The attraction of imagining new forms is that it lets us dream in a new Palestine and live in a new Palestine – in other words it allows us to ‘materialize' an imaginary Palestine, one that can be thought of in various ways, for Palestine exists in its multiplicities.

This is not to say that Palestine should merely exist in our imagination, but this is what it has come to: a place that must go beyond reality, for there is no one physical place that is equal to a Palestinian's memories, longings and reveries – our imaginations. Our notions of the real and the imaginary are nothing but misunderstandings. This is why the role of longing is much more than a problem to be solved, it, like translation, lets itself be represented in fantastic variations.

Read more »

Oliver Clegg. There You Are. 2010

Oil on dismantled 1970's school desk.

More here and here.

From 1977, Joseph Brodsky in the NYRB (image from Wikimedia Commons):

The uneventfulness of Cavafy’s life extends to his never having published a book of his poems. He lived in Alexandria, wrote poems (occasionally printing them infeuilles volantes, as pamphlets or broadsheets in a severely limited edition), talked in cafés to local or visiting literati, played cards, bet on horses, visited homosexual brothels, and sometimes attended church.

I believe that there are at least five editions of Cavafy’s poetry in English. The most successful renderings are those by Rae Dalven and Messrs. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. The hard-cover version of the latter is bilingual. Since there is little or no cooperation in the world of translation, translators sometimes duplicate others’ efforts without knowing it. But a reader may benefit from such duplication and, in a way, the poet may benefit too. In this case, at least, he does, although there is a great deal of similarity between the two books in the goal they set themselves of straightforward rendering. Judged by this goal, Keeley and Sherrard’s versions are certainly superior. It is lucky though that less than half of Cavafy’s work is rhymed, and mostly his early poems.

Every poet loses in translation, and Cavafy is not an exception. What is exceptional is that he also gains. He gains not only because he is a fairly didactic poet, but also because, starting as early as 1900-1910, he began to strip his poems of all poetic paraphernalia—rich imagery, similes, metric flamboyance, and, as already mentioned, rhymes. This is the economy of maturity, and Cavafy resorts to deliberately “poor” means, to using words in their primary meanings as a further move toward economy. Thus he calls emeralds “green” and describes bodies as being “young and beautiful.” This technique comes out of Cavafy’s realization that language is not a tool of cognition but one of assimilation, that the human being is a natural bourgeois and uses language for the same ends as he uses housing or clothing. Poetry seems to be the only weapon able to beat language, using language’s own means.

Alex Sayf Cummings in Salon:

Imagine that a popular American rock band – say, the Black Keys – wrote a song about immigrants. There are too many of them, the lyrics suggest, and they take jobs away from native-born workers. The chorus recommends that they go back to their countries of origin, where they really belong. Though the song was meant to satirize xenophobia, “No Mexicans” could be easily interpreted as an anthem of racism.

This was the situation that the Beatles faced in 1969, when they first concocted the song that would become “Get Back.” Better known as a playful take on counterculture, starring the gender-bending Sweet Loretta Martin and the grass-smoking Jo-Jo, the song originally dealt with South Asian immigration to the United Kingdom. The strange story of “Get Back,” its politics, and its bootlegs tells us much about the limits of what musicians, even hugely popular and politically engaged ones, can say in popular music — and what’s at stake in the battle over file-sharing and free culture today.

An early version of the song, known to bootleggers as “No Pakistanis,” began with Paul McCartney muttering, “Don’t dig no Pakistanis taking all the people’s jobs.” Many Americans have heard similar complaints, having listened to the anti-immigrant invective of Joe Arpaio and Tom Tancredo for years. Brits are also familiar with such rhetoric, seeing the British Nationalist Party ride their slogan of “British jobs for British workers” to prominence in the last decade.

Many who hear the song today are startled to hear this sort of cranky posturing from the Beatles, the lovable moptops who told us that “All You Need Is Love.” Bootleg versions of “No Pakistanis” have even won the hearts of neo-Nazi groups like Stormfront, who believe that the Beatles were really on the side of the white man’s cause all along. (The white supremacist band Battlecry even recorded its own clueless version of the tune.) If released today, a similar song would likely ignite controversy, regardless of the songwriter’s intentions.

Pigeons
.
Like every kingdom,
the kingdom of birds
has its multitude of the poor,
the urban, public poor
whose droppings whiten
shingles and sidewalks,

who pick and pick
(but rarely choose)
whatever meets their beaks:
the daily litter
in priceless Italian cities,
and here, around City Hall—
always underfoot,
offending fastidious people
with places to go.

No one remembers how it happened,
their decline, the near-
abandonment of flight,
the querulous murmurs,
the garbage-filled crops.
Once they were elegant, carefree;
they called to each other in rich, deep voices,
and we called them doves
and welcomed them to our gardens.

.
by Lisel Mueller
from Alive Together
Louisiana State University Press

Eran Gilat in lensculture:

I am a neuroscientist and an avid art photographer. In recent years I found myself directing most of my attention and energy to still life photography of biological specimens, highly inspired by my long-lasting confrontation with biological tissues in my clinical research. It takes a while for a young clinician or a researcher to accommodate to the laboratory or hospital scenes. Even after extensive training, some cannot adjust to the visuals. I feel my photographic activity carries me to these sometimes emotionally disturbing regions too.

My photographic activity deals with the aesthetics of the scene, improvising various contexts; the tools and paraphernalia shown are not just the typical ones used in the operating place. My “Life Science” project situates biological tissue into relatively pleasant, sometimes artificial scenarios, contemplating issues of materialism, erotica and mortality, corresponding with the complicated and intriguing category of “Animal Reminder” in the visual arts. I feel my work also challenges various ideas about violence. We tend to describe violent humankind behavior as an animal-like beastly revolting one, associated with violent animal behavior. However, I believe in many aspects we are inferior to the moral conduct of the animal world, while being superior in our “creative violent behavior”.

More here.

From Boston Review:

The book, however, that accounted most fully for the ’50s’ near-morbid desire for security at any price, had been written a decade earlier by the émigré psychoanalyst Erich Fromm. Escape from Freedom (1941), rooted in a European intellectual thought that had been heavily influenced by the work of both Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, brought social psychology to the United States where, in the years ahead, it flourished wildly. The book launched its author on one of the most celebrated careers that any public intellectual, anywhere, has ever achieved.

Erich Fromm was born in 1900 in Frankfurt, Germany, into a lower-middle-class Jewish family that was nominally Orthodox. While Fromm never became religious, very early he fell in love with Judaism’s great book of wisdom, and for years wished only to become a student of the Talmud. At the same time, on the verge of teenaged life, he came under the influence of an employee of his father, who introduced him to the work of Karl Marx. Then came the First World War, which, in later years, Fromm labeled “the most crucial experience of my life.” His newest biographer, historian Lawrence J. Friedman, tells us in The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love’s Prophet that when the war was over the eighteen-year-old Fromm remained “obsessed by . . . the wish to understand the irrationality of human mass behavior.” By Fromm’s own accounting, these three strands of influence—Talmudic ethics, Marxist socialism, and the psychological power of unreason—shaped his intellectual life.

More here.

Ashwin Parameswaran in Macroeconomic Resilience (image from Wikimedia Commons):

Most critics of neoliberalism on the left point to the dramatic reduction in the scale of government activities since the 80s – the privatisation of state-run enterprises, the increased dependence upon private contractors for delivering public services etc. Most right-wing critics lament the increasing regulatory burden faced by businesses and individuals and the preferential treatment and bailouts doled out to the politically well-connected. Neither the left nor the right is wrong. But both of them only see one side of what is the core strategy of neoliberal crony capitalism – increase the scope and reduce the scale of government intervention. Where the government was the sole operator, such as prisons and healthcare, “pragmatic” privatisation leaves us with a mix of heavily regulated oligopolies and risk-free private contracting relationships. On the other hand, where the private sector was allowed to operate without much oversight the “pragmatic” reform involves the subordination of free enterprise to a “sensible” regulatory regime and public-private partnerships to direct capital to social causes. In other words, expand the scope of government to permeate as many economic activities as possible and contract the scale of government within its core activities.

Some of the worst manifestations of crony capitalism can be traced to this perverse pragmatism. The increased scope and reduced scale are the main reasons for the cosy revolving door between incumbent crony capitalists and the government. The left predictably blames it all on the market, the right blames government corruption, while the revolving door of “pragmatic” politicians and crony capitalists rob us blind.

I wrote The Spy Who Came in from the Cold at the age of 30 under intense, unshared, personal stress, and in extreme privacy. As an intelligence officer in the guise of a junior diplomat at the British Embassy in Bonn, I was a secret to my colleagues, and much of the time to myself. I had written a couple of earlier novels, necessarily under a pseudonym, and my employing service had approved them before publication. After lengthy soul-searching, they had also approved The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. To this day, I don’t know what I would have done if they hadn’t. As it was, they seem to have concluded, rightly if reluctantly, that the book was sheer fiction from start to finish, uninformed by personal experience, and that accordingly it constituted no breach of security. This was not, however, the view taken by the world’s press, which with one voice decided that the book was not merely authentic but some kind of revelatory Message From The Other Side, leaving me with nothing to do but sit tight and watch, in a kind of frozen awe, as it climbed the bestseller list and stuck there, while pundit after pundit heralded it as the real thing.

more from John le Carré at The Guardian here.

From The Independent:

They are often described as “The Unholy Trinity” – a trio of ferociously bright and pugilistic academics who use science to decimate what they believe to be the world’s greatest folly: religion. But now Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris are on the receiving end of stinging criticism from fellow liberal non-believers who say their particular brand of atheism has swung from being a scientifically rigorous attack on all religions to a populist and crude hatred of Islam. In the last fortnight a series of columns have been written denouncing the so-called New Atheist movement for, in one writer’s words, lending a “veneer of scientific respectability to today's politically-useful bigotry.” The opening broadside began earlier this month with a polemic from Nathan Lean on the Salon.com website. Lean, a Washington DC native and Middle East specialist who has recently written a book about the Islamophobia industry, was prompted to pen his attack following a series of tweets last month by Professor Dawkins attacking Islam in snappy 140 character sound bites. “Haven’t read Koran so couldn’t quote chapter & verse like I can for Bible. But often say Islam [is the] greatest force for evil today,” the Cambridge evolutionary biologist wrote on 1 March.

Writing on Al Jazeera’s website a few days later, Murtaza Hussain, a Toronto based Middle East analyst, penned an even more scathing critique. What the New Atheists were doing, he argued, was similar to the kind of scientific racism that was dominant within western cultures in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as they tried to use eugenics to classify – and consequently legitimise – the subjugation of certain races. Hussain reserved particular ire for Sam Harris, a neuroscientist by trade whose atheist tracts “The End of Faith” and “Letter to a Christian Nation” have made him one of the leading anti-religious polemicists of his age. Harris is an accomplished writer and public speaker with a solid background in academic rigour. But there are no shortages of statements from his over the years lumping all Muslims into one box. “The idea that Islam is a ‘peaceful religion hijacked by extremists’ is a fantasy, and is now a particularly dangerous fantasy for Muslims to indulge,” is just one he wrote in “Letter to a Christian Nation.” Wearing a palpable disdain for Islam on his sleeve he has also written in favour of torture, pre-emptive nuclear strikes and the profiling not just of Muslims but “anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be a Muslim.” In response, Hussain wrote: “[Harris’] sweeping generalisations about a constructed civilisation encompassing over a billion people are coupled with fevered warnings – parallel with the most noxious race propaganda of the past – about the purported demographic threat posed by immigrant Muslim birthrates to Western civilisation.”

More here.

Mark Blyth’s important polemic Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea seeks to put much of this in perspective. Blyth, a professor at Brown University, is no two-handed economist. He pulls no punches in making the case against austerity. His idiom is not that of modern macroeconomics – no theoretical equations, econometrics, stylised models, or even data tables. Rather, Blyth writes in the tradition of Keynes, slashing away at orthodoxy and the orthodox, emphasising the power of ideas as well as interests in shaping outcomes, ranging widely over the history of economic and political thought, expressing deep scepticism about financial actors, and rejecting the curtailment of spending as the solution to a period of excess. Much of what he says is valid and compelling. On many previous occasions – notably efforts to return to the gold standard during the interwar period – austerity has proven to be a disastrous policy. Contrary to widespread belief, the historical record suggests it is more plausible to blame the rise of Hitler on the depression under way as he rose to power than on the previous hyperinflation.

more from Lawrence Summers at the FT here.