McKenzie Wark on Andrey Platonov's Happy Moscow in the LA Review of Books:

Platonov was that rare thing, a proletarian writer. The son of a railway worker, he enthusiastically joined the revolution in 1917, seduced as many were by Lenin’s leap of faith. But disillusionment set in quickly. Stunned by the effects of the drought and famine of 1921, he studied engineering and for most of the 1920s worked on electrification and irrigation projects, only becoming a full-time writer at the end of the decade. While many of his stories saw print, his important cycle of novellas of Soviet life from the revolution through to the rise of Stalin went unpublished in his lifetime. Today, his most ambitious book, Chevengur — an allegorical history of the revolution and civil war — is, regrettably, still out of print, but New York Review Books Classics have issued three of his other works in beautifully produced editions.

Platonov is best known in the West for his compact masterpiece, The Foundation Pit, a sly reworking of the Stalinist genre of “Five Year Plan novels” in which heroic party activists inspire the workers to overcome obstacles and raise productivity It is a great work on the intimacy of violence and spectacle. At the beginning of the novel, the factory worker Voschev, the novel’s central character, stands still in the middle of production and thinks about a plan for the shared and general life — and is fired. Soon after, Voschev chances upon a building site where a small band of workers are digging an enormous foundation pit for a future House of the Proletariat. The pit keeps getting dug deeper and wider.

The novel’s central image, of course, plays on the basic Marxist trope of base and superstructure: it is clear that no base could ever support the extravagant superstructure promised by the reigning ideology. Platonov’s working class characters all speak in the approved slogans and jargon of the time, but they make mincemeat of this official language, denaturing it and recomposing its ideological force.

Ashwin Parameswaran over at Macroeconomic Resilience (image from Wikimedia Commons):

One of the little known facts of the history of monetary policy is that until 1994, the Fed did not actually announce interest rate decisions. Market participants had to infer rate changes from the Fed’s open market operations. This is just one example of how so many things we take to be natural and obvious are, in reality, relatively recent phenomena. In less than twenty years, the Fed has transitioned from near-opacity to an almost obsessive transparency. Another example of a relatively recent monetary policy doctrine that is now unquestioned is the doctrine of inflation targeting. The essential idea of inflation targeting is that people and firms should not have to think about the level and volatility of inflation when they make economic decisions. Inflation must therefore be kept at low and stable levels so that the long-run costs of unpredictable and uncertain inflation are minimised. As Mervyn King notes, inflation targeting has always been about improving the “credibility and predictability of monetary policy”.

However, in a world where money earns interest, minimising the uncertainty of macroeconomic policy does not equate to minimising the volatility of inflation. When all money bears interest, all that matters for those who hold money or bonds is the real interest rate earned on money and bonds. Given the fiscal stance and state of private credit growth, central banks should manage the real rate of interest such that rentiers do not capture a free lunch (i.e. real rates should not be too high) and there is no risk of a hot-potato/credit-bubble cycle (i.e. real rates should not be too low).

Money does not bear interest today because central banks pay interest on reserves. The primary reason why we live in a world of interest-bearing money is the gradual deregulation and innovation in financial markets over the last thirty years that triggered a shift from money to near-money assets.

It is always a hard question whether new technologies require the revision of old arguments. Targeted killing isn’t new, and I am going to repeat an old argument about it. But targeted killing with drones? Here the old arguments, though they still make sense, leave me uneasy. First things first. Untargeted killing, random killing, the bomb in the supermarket, the café, or the bus station: we call that terrorism, and its condemnation is critically important. No qualifications, no apologies: this is wrongfulness of the first order. But someone who takes aim at a particular person, a political official, a military officer, is engaged in a different activity. He may be a just assassin, as in Camus’s play, though I don’t think that the justice of the killing depends on the killer’s willingness to accept death himself (which is Camus’s argument). It depends on the character of the official or the officer, the character of the regime he serves, and the immediate political circumstances: what else is there to do? But even if the assassination is a wrongful act, as it most often is in history if not in literature, the wrongfulness is of a second order.

more from Michael Walzer at Dissent here.

If animal intelligence exists, it is of course a property of living animals. This may appear as a departure from our guiding concern, shared with the comparative anatomists at the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, with the study of natural order as reflected through the anatomical evidence of –obviously– dead animals. No one disputes that a human skeleton in a display case is no more or less intelligent than a macaque in formaldehyde. Yet it is hard to look for too long at these different products of nature and not come to the conclusion that they are substantially the same, that they are diverse expressions of the same order, and if the one exhibits a different behavioral repertoire than the other over the course of its brief life, this does not, could not, place them on separate sides of a gaping divide from one another. It is sometimes said that death is the great equalizer, and this is born out by the project of comparative anatomy, which reveals the fundamental unity of structure that, in life, permits such an efflorescence of different sorts of activity. We are in the habit of calling our own sort of activity ‘intelligent’, and of permitting ourselves to be perpetually surprised when animal activity resembles our own too closely, since intelligence has already been defined as uniquely human. It is undeniable that humans are peculiar: as has been said, their crania are greatly inflated compared to their nearest primate relatives, and their teeth are greatly reduced. But a good strong bite is an expression of nature’s reason too, and comparative anatomy helps to see that in the balance between teeth and cranium, there is no absolute reason for preferring the one advantage or the other.

more from Justin E. H. Smith at Belfrois here.

Thus, there’s an added resonance to the publication at this particular moment of On Democracy, which contains three Hussein speeches on the topic. Of course, it would be easy to dismiss Hussein’s democratic musings as a bad joke, and their circuitous route to publication began this way, at least according to journalist Jeff Severns Guntzel, who describes in the book’s introduction how during a visit to Baghdad doing humanitarian work before the second Gulf War an Iraqi friend gave him a collection of Hussein essays on democracy as a “gag gift,” which in turn became much less funny after Iraq was turned into an inferno by the US invasion and ongoing internecine warfare. On Democracy is the project of an art book publisher. Badlands Unlimited was founded by artist Paul Chan, who spent a month in Iraq with peace-activist organization Voices in the Wilderness right before the U.S. invasion in March 2003, which is partly how Hussein’s text ended up in his hands. Throughout his career, Chan has intermingled art and politics in provocative ways. His drawing of Hussein after the latter’s capture by U.S. forces appears on the book’s front cover.

more from Alan Gilbert at Bookforum here.

From Huffington Post:

In her deeply fascinating, often moving TEDTalk, “Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are,” Amy Cuddy offers up a thesis with startling implications: even the simplest act, repeated over time, can profoundly shape our destiny. After citing evidence from her own research that two minutes of standing in a more powerful position alters our brain and body chemistry, helping us become more assertive, confident, and passionate, Dr. Cuddy goes on to describe how she, herself, overcame the debilitating neurological effects of a devastating auto accident by faking confidence until she actually became confident. She stands before us, transformed from the diffident, traumatized young woman she once was, into a vibrant, compelling leader in her field — living proof that how we behave shapes not just our feelings, but who we are.

For many, this research may come as a surprise, but Dr. Cuddy's findings are actually part of a rapidly growing body of evidence that, across a range of important human experiences, feeling often follows action. We tend to assume it's our personality — the sum total of our attitudes, motivations and emotions — that prompts us to either ascend a stage and address a potential audience of millions or, alternatively, stay at home with a bag of potato chips, yelling at the TV during Sunday Night Football. But the lesson of Dr. Cuddy's work, and that of many others, is that very often, it's the other way around: first we act; then we feel. And some of the earliest studies that arrived at this conclusion concerned not feelings of confidence, but those of attraction and love.

More here.

However Deep the Night I Expect Morning

Fog rolls into the valley, rolls
Where my mind goes into the evening,
As the rhythm of city syncopates my walk,
The roar of jets, the whisper of beggars,
Parks have their statues

In this city I know
Know where to find the best soup,
Where often the bands play the pigeons flock
Above heads of idols and unknown heroes
Not far from my tenement above Stockton and Vallejo;
I play Go from a book.

Rinds of light and rain fall silently
Equally on door knobs of silver or copper
This town dreams are altered by Andy and Val
Fight domestic while mice noisily cum
They do not expect morning

I think of crimson electric when morning sun rises
Arriving like a Chagall painting
A man floats up to kiss a woman from the Bolshoi Ballet

I am writing to you as I do, ever so remorseful
The window sill announces there is rain outside
But your purring has begun here in pulses of 8 to 80
As you break night once more and again
I write to you as I do and writing as you yourself do

On onion skin the lightest of verse
The lightest of verse, the lightest of verse
.

by Koon Woon

From The Science Network:

Critically acclaimed author and professor of philosophy, A.C. Grayling will be at Warwick's on Monday, April 11th at 7:30pm to discuss and sign his new book, The Good Book: A Humanist Bible. Published on the four hundredth anniversary of the King James Bible, a book of extraordinary audacity from a remarkable thinker – a secular humanist Bible drawn from the wisdom and inspiration in the world's great literature. Few, if any, thinkers and writers today would have the imagination, the breadth of knowledge, and the literary skill to conceive of a powerful, secular alternative to the Bible. But that is exactly what A. C. Grayling has done, creating a nonreligious Bible drawn from the wealth of secular literature and philosophy in both Western and Eastern traditions, using the same techniques of editing, redaction, and adaptation that produced the holy books of the Judeo-Christian and Islamic religions.

The Good Book consciously takes its design and presentation from the Bible, in the beauty of its language and its arrangement into short chapters and verses, offering to the nonreligious seeker all the wisdom, insight, solace, inspiration, and perspective of various secular humanist traditions. Organized in twelve main sections – Genesis, Histories, Wisdom, The Sages, Parables, Consolations, Lamentations, Proverbs, Songs, Epistles, Acts, and The Good Book opens with meditations on the origin and progress of the world and human life in it, then devotes attention to the question of how life should be lived, how we relate to one another, and how vicissitudes are to be faced and joys appreciated. Inspired by the work of Herodotus and Lucretius, Confucius and Mencius, Seneca and Cicero, Montaigne, Bacon, and so many others, The Good Book is a publishing event and a literary tour de force.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in The Loom:

When biologists think about the evolution of life, they think about climbing mountains.

To understand their alpine frame of mind, imagine a biologist studying the fish in a lake. Each fish may be born big or small. Fish born at certain sizes may be more likely to survive and reproduce than others. Each fish may be aggressive or shy. Again, their aggressiveness may determine their odds of having babies.

To picture all of this, it’s very helpful to imagine a landscape. Each point on that landscape is a different combination of aggression and body size. They’re like the longitude and latitude on a map. Each combination leads to a particular level of reproductive success. Picture that success as the elevation of that point on the landscape. The more success, the higher the altitude.

The biology of those fish can give the landscape a topography. Perhaps it produces a single mountain. The peak is the combination of weight and aggression that produces the most possible babies. The landscape drops off in all directions, to combinations that make it more likely the fish will die, or fail to reproduce.

The actual fish in the actual lake might turn out to be clustered on one of the mountain’s flanks. The fish closer to the peak have more babies than the others further downhill. As a result, they’ll pass down more copies of their genes to the next generation. And that means that the population will climb up towards the peak. If a new mutation arises, natural selection will favor it if it helps the fish climb further. Eventually, the fish may reach the mountaintop. Once they plant their flag on the peak, they’ll be stuck. Natural selection won’t be able to nudge them off.

Now imagine that there are two peaks, not one. The fish sit on one mountaintop, while the second peak towers over them in the distance. They can’t get to that second peak, though, because natural selection can only nudge them uphill. They are stuck with a mediocre body.

More here.

Francine Prose in the NYRB blog:

Michael Haneke’s Amour is the ultimate horror film. With its portrayal of the shocks, the cruelties and indignities to which old age and disease subject a happily married Parisian couple, it’s far scarier and more disturbing than Hitchcock’sPsycho, Kubrick’s The Shining, or Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, and like those films, it stays with you long after you might have chosen to forget it. Like all of Haneke’s work, Amour raises interesting and perhaps unanswerable questions: Can a film be a masterpiece and still make you want to warn people not to see it? Can a movie make you think that an artist has done something extraordinary, original, extremely difficult—and yet you cannot imagine yourself uttering the words, “You’ve got to go see Amour”?

It’s hard not to appreciate the film’s extraordinary qualities. Jean-Louis Trintignant, Emmanuelle Riva, and Isabelle Huppert deliver performances so convincing and delicately nuanced that we forget they are actors, let alone French movie stars; their ability to make us think we are watching real people is partly why the film is at once so impressive and so distressing. Every camera angle seems meticulously chosen, every scene artfully composed; every detail of costume and setting—a worn bathrobe, a pair of slippers, dresses hanging in a closet, the precise way that the piano is positioned in the living room, the “good” furniture so familiar that it has become almost invisible to its owners—is appropriate to the two elderly musicians whose travails we are watching; every exchange appears to have been written and shot with perfect confidence about precisely how much to conceal or reveal.

But Amour can be excruciating to watch. The film’s narrative arc is more or less clear from the opening scene, in which we see firemen bashing their way into a handsome, high-ceilinged, old-fashioned Paris apartment. The workers are visibly disturbed by a smell that turns out to come from the corpse of an old woman: nicely dressed, comfortably positioned in bed, her hair fixed, decked with flowers, all of it conveying the odd jauntiness one sometimes observes in Sicilian catacombs. Then, the action shifts back in time.

Colin Asher in The Believer:

Nelson Algren was the son of a no-luck working stiff and the grandson of a religious zealot turned grifter, and he was a type of loser we can’t stomach in this country. Algren made his living as a writer for forty years, occasionally to great acclaim. At the height of his career, wealth, leisure, and the lasting respect of his peers were on offer, but Algren shrugged at those prospects and kept going his own way. For Algren, the decision was as much a question of constitution as it was of rational choice, and he paid for it dearly. America has always been able to countenance beggars, short-con men, and nine-to-fivers who just can’t get ahead, but we’ve never known what to do with the type of person who could have been really big but chose not to make the concessions required.

Algren wrote eleven books in his lifetime: one polemical, amateurish, and overwritten; five brilliant; one bitter, satirical, and unfocused; and four very good; more or less in that order. [1] From the publication of his first book, in 1935, until his death, in 1981, every word Algren wrote was guided by the belief that writing can be literature only if intended as a challenge to authority. He didn’t compromise that position when Hollywood called, or the FBI, or Joseph McCarthy, junior senator from Wisconsin, or even for the sake of his own sanity after he decided that his life’s work had been in vain. Which may be why all of his books were out of print when he died, alone in the bathroom of a $375-a-month Long Island rental, at the age of seventy-two. Only a few friends, no family, and a single black-clad fan were present at his funeral to hear Joe Pintauro, a young writer of short acquaintance, read seven lines of Algren’s poetry as a pressboard coffin was lowered into the ground:

Again that hour when taxies start deadheading home
Before the trolley-buses start to run
And snow dreams in a lace of mist drift down
When from asylum, barrack, cell and cheap hotel
All those whose lives were lived by someone else
Come once again with palms outstretched to claim
What rightly never was their own

Sasha Abramsky in The Nation:

While in the White House, Bill Clinton pardoned well over 100 people. So did President Bush. To date, Obama has pardoned less than two dozen and commuted even fewer sentences. His first commutation wasn’t until late November 2011, when, according to CBS News, he ordered the release of a woman who had served ten years of a twenty-two-year sentence for cocaine distribution. CBS reported that “the latest numbers from the US Pardon Attorney show that since taking office Obama has denied 872 applications for pardons and 3,104 for commutations of sentence.” A year later, ThinkProgress reported that the only presidential pardon granted in 2012 was for the lucky turkey, as part of the Thanksgiving tradition.

A president who talks the talk about more sensible, nuanced drug policy, and whose oratory frequently invokes what is best in the American political imagination, has shown himself remarkably reluctant to use one of the most important of presidential prerogatives—the power to right judicial wrongs. “This president,” says Anderson, “has been unbelievably timid and disinclined to do justice in cases that scream out for commutation. There’s not a lot of moral or political fortitude in play.”

On January 5, The New York Times ran an editorial calling on the president to exercise his pardon power—while also pointing out that the Justice Department, too, “has undermined the process with huge backlogs and delays, and sometimes views pardons as an affront to federal efforts to fight crime.” The Times also blamed Ronald Rodgers, the lawyer who runs the Office of the Pardon Attorney and has obstructed the process, and argued that his office should be replaced with “a new bipartisan commission under the White House’s aegis, giving it ample resources and real independence.”

I couldn’t help thinking of John Le Carré’s spy novels as I awaited my rendezvous with Jaron Lanier in a corner of the lobby of the stylish W Hotel just off Union Square in Manhattan. Le Carré’s espionage tales, such as The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, are haunted by the spectre of the mole, the defector, the double agent, who, from a position deep inside, turns against the ideology he once professed fealty to. And so it is with Jaron Lanier and the ideology he helped create, Web 2.0 futurism, digital utopianism, which he now calls “digital Maoism,” indicting “internet intellectuals,” accusing giants like Facebook and Google of being “spy agencies.” Lanier was one of the creators of our current digital reality and now he wants to subvert the “hive mind,” as the web world’s been called, before it engulfs us all, destroys political discourse, economic stability, the dignity of personhood and leads to “social catastrophe.” Jaron Lanier is the spy who came in from the cold 2.0.

more from Ron Rosenbaum at The Smithsonian here.

Nonetheless, Raphael’s love of art usually came before his love of women. So when in 1814 Ingres painted the first historical genre scene of Raphael with La Fornarina in the studio (during a lunch break at 1.30 pm), she sits fully clothed on his lap, but he keeps hold of his porte-crayon and turns away to look at the underdrawing for her portrait. The implication is that underdrawings are even more interesting than undergarments. Raphael now becomes something very important: a model for the artist whose sexual energies are sublimated in his art. The case was made with typical robustness by Nietzsche in The Will to Power, possibly while looking at a print of Ingres’s painting. He was equally dismissive of the idea that Raphael indulged in casual sex. Great artists have to be physically strong, with plenty of sexual energy – “without a certain overheating of the sexual system a Raphael is unthinkable”. Yet despite the artist’s susceptibility to sensory stimulation and intoxication – “how wise it is at times to be a little tipsy!” – he is usually chaste. His dominant instinct “does not permit him to expend himself in any casual way”.

more from James Hall at the TLS here.

It is often said that shopping in the modern meaning of the word – that familiar combination of economic exchange, voyeurism and leisure pastime – is a relatively recent invention. The English verb ‘to shop’, for example, in the sense of retail activity (rather than its earlier – now slang – meaning of ‘to imprison or inform on someone’), is not attested until the mid-18th century; and the noun ‘shopper’ not until a hundred years after that. But this poem about a ladies’ outing to the shoe emporium seems to show that a very similar kind of activity, with some of the same pleasures, took place in the ancient Mediterranean. In fact it is not so different from another (fictional) shopping trip, more than two thousand years later, also in Alexandria. In the middle of Evelyn Waugh’s Officers and Gentlemen, Mrs Stitch goes off to the bazaar with Guy Crouchback, visits the shoemaker’s shop, is given a stool to sit on, listens to the sales pitch while she inspects the stock – and then goes away, the proud possessor of a lovely pair of crimson slippers.

more from Mary Beard at the LRB here.

Stephen Grosz in The Telegraph:

From PhysOrg:

Researchers in California and Switzerland have discovered that melanomas that develop resistance to the anti-cancer drug vemurafenib (marketed as Zelboraf), also develop addiction to the drug, an observation that may have important implications for the lives of patients with late-stage disease. The team, based at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research (NIBR) in Emeryville, Calif., and University Hospital Zurich, found that one mechanism by which melanoma cells become resistant to vemurafenib also renders them “addicted” to the drug. As a result, the melanoma cells nefariously use vemurafenib to spur the growth of rapidly progressing, deadly and drug-resistant tumors.

As described this week in the journal Nature, the team built upon this basic discovery and showed that adjusting the dosing of the drug and introducing an on-again, off-again treatment schedule prolonged the life of mice with melanoma. “Remarkably, intermittent dosing with vemurafenib prolonged the lives of mice with drug-resistant melanoma tumors,” said co-lead researcher Martin McMahon, PhD, the Efim Guzik Distinguished Professor of Cancer Biology in the UCSF Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center. It is therefore possible that a similar approach may extend the effectiveness of the drug for people – an idea that awaits testing in clinical trials.

More here.

Bullet

I have a bullet made of icy silver to give you.

I prepared it last night with dirty, sweet, infallible blood. I prayed
with it for hours. I attended it with candles and the most secret
invocations.

First off, I blinded it, because a bullet must never see the ominous air
or the body it will encounter. After, I deafened it, so that it wouldn’t
hear the cries or threats or music of the flesh and bones while shattering.

I only left its lips so it could whistle.

Understand what I say:

whistles are bullets’ words: they are their ruthless final kisses piercing
the smoothness of the night; their wonder and their plea, their breath.

by Carlos López Degregori
translation 2010, Robin Myers
publisher: PIW, 2010

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My Money

My money is beautiful.
Like having a flower, a tree, the sky,
‘Gioconda’,
These are beautiful things,
But my money is beautiful, too.
It lies in my pocket and I can touch it –
It’s little and much loved.
It’s so enchanting without being coy,
I can show it to you again and again,
And I can fix it to my buttonhole like a tulip.

My money,
My money . . .

This is a colourful performance,
This is a poor decoration,
This the shiny skin of non-existence.

I will wave it and enter into existence,
where there is a flower, a tree, the sky,
‘Gioconda’.

I shall enter.
I shall enter.

A ticket for me,
And a ticket for you – be my guest.

You know, life is beautiful,
If you attain it with beautiful money.

When I become an old man,
I think I shall give my beautiful money
To the museum of life
As a permanent exhibit.

People will come and enjoy
Looking at my beautiful money.

They will stand there for a long time, excited,
Then they will go home and think about it,
What’s good about it,
When you have a beautiful life,
A beautiful house,
A beautiful poem.

They will think about it,
What’s good about it,
When your money is as beautiful
As your pregnant wife.
.

by Shota Iatashvili
from pankari tsasji (‘Pencil in the Air ’)
publisher: Caucasian House, Tbilisi, 2004
translation: 2007, Donald Rayfield