It is not uncommon to mark one’s reservation at the Arcadian settings so favored by these huts, as if marking the shape of distance that serious writing must take – distance from technology, from the modern, from the city. Is there not something politically anachronistic about the image of the water trough outside Heidegger’s hut, where a spring unfailingly flows? Is anything like a progressive stance compatible with such atavistic images? Is there not a tacit repudiation of a different style of critique – the sort leveled by (say) the peripatetic eye of a Walter Benjamin at our urban Arcades? Politically perhaps Hannah Arendt had it right: “Flight from the world … can always be justified as long as reality is not ignored but acknowledged as the thing that must be escaped.” (“Men in Dark Times”). More broadly, might it not be that the bland space of the cabin, like the yellow pad, or the laptop screen, is something of a neutral ground making room for the refiguration or transformation of the real – not a flight in the sense of repudiation of the real, rather relief from the pressure of its organizing principles.

more from David Wood at The Opinionater here.

“So many tangles in life are ultimately hopeless that we have no appropriate sword other than laughter,” said Gordon Allport, an American psychologist and one of the founders of the study of personality. Scientists have studied the effects of mirthful laughter, positive thinking and optimism on feelings of self-worth, mood disorders and depression since the 1970s. In The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking British author and Guardian feature writer Oliver Burkeman takes issue with “the cult of optimism,” the convention that phony smiles, jovial laughter and positive thinking is a surefire path to happiness. Positive thinking is the problem, not the solution, Burkeman teaches us. He believes people have come to trust that a “Don’t worry. Be happy” attitude toward life is the only route to contentment. People seem to be of the conviction that if you have negative thoughts and see your own limits, you cannot be happy. So to be happy we must set out on a journey that changes your mindset from negative and inhibited to enthusiastic, fervent and animated. We are told to visualize our dreams and goals, eliminate the word “impossible” from our vocabulary and put a big fabricated smile on our physiognomy. All that actually can lead to unhappiness, Burkeman says.

more from Berit Brogaard at The Berlin Review of Books here.

WITH ITS ARTLESSLY PERFECT FIRST SENTENCE — “They threw me off the hay truck about noon” — James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice drew a line in the sand as defiant as any in literature since The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Not unlike that novel, Postman forced an untamed populist voice onto more exalted cultural sensibilities; of course, nothing could be more American. Cain is a major figure of American fiction’s shadow pantheon, the one that includes not Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Steinbeck but Paul Bowles, William Burroughs, and Philip K. Dick, with Faulkner, Miller, and Pynchon wandering the demilitarized zone between. The most commercially successful of them, Cain was also the most spiritually bleak, finding his calling late and fast in the Depression’s depths after a fitful career as a journalist. The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) was a sensation and scandal, at the other end of the bookshelf from The Grapes of Wrath (1939): Tom Joad may have been riding that hay truck too, but Frank Chambers is the one who got thrown off.

more from Steve Erickson at the LA Review of Books here.

Grant Brunner in Extreme Tech:

Led by Stephen Chou, the team has made two dramatic improvements: reducing reflectivity, and more effectively capturing the light that isn’t reflected. As you can see by the illustration below by Dimitri Karetnikov, Princeton’s new solar cell is much thinner and less reflective. By utilizing sandwiched plastic and metal with the nanomesh, this so-called “Plasmonic Cavity with Subwavelength Hole array” or “PlaCSH” substantially reduces the potential for losing the light itself. In fact, it only reflects about 4% of direct sunlight, leading to a 52% higher efficiency than conventional, organic solar cells.

PlaCSH is also capable of capturing a large amount of sunlight even when the sunlight is dispersed on cloudy days, which results in an amazing 81% increase in efficiency under indirect lighting conditions when compared to conventional organic solar cell technology. All told, PlaCSH is up to 175% more efficient than conventional solar cells. As you can see in the image above, the difference in reflectivity between conventional and PlaCSH solar cells is really quite dramatic.

The gold mesh that sits on top is incredibly small. It’s only 30 nanometers thick. The holes in the mesh are a mere 175nm in diameter. This replaces the much thicker traditional top layer made out of indium-tin-oxide (ITO). This is the most important part of the innovation. Because the mesh is actually smaller than the wavelength of the light it’s trying to collect, it exploits the bizarre way that light works in subwavelength structures.

More here.

Amal Hanano in Foreign Policy:

Being from Aleppo is unlike being from anywhere else in the world. We walked on history so deep, we did not understand it — we simply learned to call this place, older than all others, home. We grew up knowing that our insignificant existence was the thinnest layer of dust on the thick geological strata of empires, kingdoms, and generations, which lived within our stone walls. We knew without doubt, from an early age, that we were nothing but a blink of our city's eye.

When you are from Aleppo, you are plagued with a predicament: Nothing here will ever change. For some people, living in the city that never changes becomes too difficult. The city's permanence and your inability to make a mark on it push you to eventually leave Aleppo, trading comfort for change. After you leave, no matter where you are in the world, you know that Aleppo is there, waiting exactly as you left it. Instead, it is you who returns in a reinvented form each time you come home — a university graduate, a bride, a mother, each time proudly carrying your new ideas and identity to your patiently waiting city.

In Aleppo, you grow up worrying if your legacy will ever be worthy of your city's. But you never worry about your city's legacy — which we thoughtlessly leaned on — for how could we, ever, change Aleppo's legacy?

More here.

A Visit to Ballimaran
—For Prashant Keshavmurthy

No longer that alleyway
of unending pastimes,
no longer that couplet
stalling a game of dice,
no longer that foot’s pause
driving a thought home,
no longer that inspiration
turning words into kites.

Ballimaran is a busy stream
of shoes hung for sale.

No sound of hoofs
or sight of palanquins
reigns over subjects.
The colour of footwear
automobile horns
mark the citizen’s health.

I ask a man, “Which way
to Ghalib’s home?”
His eyebrows arch, “Why didn’t
you ask him the address? A
name is not enough.”

I go my way, telling Ghalib’s
ghost, “Your name has lost its
address, your address
its neighbourhood. Is that how
one gains the world?”

The guard in blue uniform
is wearier than stone. He ushers
me inside the ancient
courtyard made up to date.

I stare at forgeries on stage
set to befool children. It isn’t easy
to veil someone’s neglected
absence.

The telephone booth is an offstage
parody of callers in prosaic
hurry. No one carves like old times a
turn of phrase to perfection.

I ponder. No one anymore counts
blessings with wine. No one
disobeys god with irony. No one braids
the night with couplets.

As light sinks a girl drifts in to read
the dilemmas of Ghalib’s heart. The azan
distracts her glued eyes. She
leaves folding a secret in her dupatta.

It is time to go home. Time to leave
what is left of Ghalib in
Qasim Jaan. To leave what is left
of Qasim Jaan in Ballimaran.

Names that belong to a different
time when the air breathed
verses. And a couplet weighed heavier
than a pair of shoes.

Manash Bhattacharjee
Delhi, 12/8/2012

“From Chapter 6: Factory Nostalgia (Notes on an Article and Various Books)”:

All those big posters stuck on the walls, showing a strapping worker rising to the sky against a background of factories, dissolve into shreds, in the sun and in the water. Masino furious at seeing his face so proud upon the walls of the streets, while he has to go out looking for work.

– Pavese, ‘Idleness’

But the worst enemy was the people. They didn’t want to be people. ‘People yourself!’ they said to Monsieur Beaulieu. We’re just as good bourgeois as you.

– Romain Rolland, Le Théâtre du people

‘I don’t see myself as a prole. And I don’t see myself as a super- intellectual, not like a student. I’m not . . . Well, I’m here’, Christine says on the steps of the Beaubourg Centre. And Eric explains, ‘We walk about one way and another, sit on the benches and watch people pass by.’

The mute voice of a subjectivity seeking to assert itself in the abbreviations of a rarefied vocabulary? A look returned from the great voyages of proletarian self-consciousness to the zero degrees of palpable certainty: ‘That’s it, we’re here, it’s like that?’ Or rather a new trick of the dialectic that underpins the look of the observer in this apparent return to the simplicity of its origins, that little nothing that, at its birth, is identical with its being?

Beaubourg, according to popular wisdom, is like a factory. Is that the reason why this is the place to come today, to seek among these ‘non-workers of the non-working class’ those voices of alienation and rebellion that Sorbonne students looked for at Billancourt twelve years ago? At that time, as a bourgeois break- ing ranks and an activist breaking with gauchisme, this was where he saw the miracle: the working class, the concept in flesh and blood. Enough to sicken those petty bourgeois whom Marcuse, Gorz, Mallet and Belleville had led to dream of a new class of auto- mated white-collar workers, or manual workers trapped by credit and bourgeois comfort. A CGT secretary who hailed from the old Faubourg Saint-Antoine had turned the key to the fortress: the key of the evident identity of the worker in his labour and his struggle.

Robert Cooper in Eurozine:

The Habsburg Monarchy lasted five centuries. It was both solid and flexible; it aroused genuine affection among its citizens. But it vanished in a puff of smoke. Should we expect the European Union, shallow in history and unloved by those it serves, to do better?

To be fair, it was more than a puff of smoke. The bullets from Gavrilo Princip's revolver killed the Arch-Duke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sofia. What killed the Habsburg Monarchy was the four years of pounding by artillery that followed. This brought death and ruin to the old Europe; in Russia it brought revolution and tyranny, and in Germany regime change accompanied by failed revolution, then inflation and depression, and finally world war and genocide.

What arose from the ashes? The answer is: the European Union and NATO. It is the EU and its resemblance to the Habsburg Monarchy that is the subject of this essay, but something needs first to be said about NATO which was and is its indispensable partner.

John Scalzi in Whatever:

1. No.

2. Seriously, are you fucking kidding me?

3. Did you wake up this morning and say to yourself “You know what? A New York Timesbestselling author who has been working full-time as a writer for two decades, who frequently rails at writers for undervaluing their own work in the market and who is also the president of a writers organization that regularly goes after publishers for not paying writers adequately is exactly the person who will be receptive, through lack of other work or personal inclination, to my offer”? And if you did, what other dumb things did you do with your morning?

4. If you didn’t know that I was that guy in point three, and just asked me to write for free for you because, I don’t know, you heard I was a writer of some sort, although you couldn’t say what kind or what I had done, then what you’re saying to me is “Hey, you’re a warm body with an allegedly working brain stem and no idea of the value of your work — let me exploit you!” I want you to ask yourself what in that estimation of me would entice me to provide you with work, starting with the fact that you didn’t do even the most basic research into who I was. Rumor is, it’s not hard to find information about me on the Internet! Just type “John Scalzi” into Google and see!

5. If you try to mumble something at me about “exposure,” I’m going to laugh my ass off at you. Explain to me, slowly, what exposure you possibly think you could give me with your Web site or publication. Please factor in that this Web site gets up to 50,000 visitors on a normal day — with spikes into the hundreds of thousands when I write something particularly clicky — and that it’s regularly ranked one of the top ten book sites and top 100 entertainment sites on the entire Web by Technorati (at this moment, number five and sixty four, respectively).

More here.

For the writer, the emphasis on the inner life of characters is itself an implicitly moral act, a least when the writer is able to fully and successfully exploit the inherent capacity of fiction to reveal the inner life. It is moral because, as Wood says of Jane Austen’s fiction, such an act allows characters and their behavior to be “gradually comprehended and finally forgiven” (“Comedy and the Irresponsible Self”). It is the writer’s success in exploiting this capacity that constitutes the “art” of the work, but the art is in the service of the moral goal. (Perhaps Wood might retort that the two cannot be so easily separated.) For the reader, the novelist’s skill in achieving this sort of compelling psychological realism allows us to inhabit a perspective other than our own, to become aware of “the thoughts of other people.” If Wood doesn’t exactly attribute a didactic moral purpose to fiction, he certainly does suggest throughout his reviews and critical essays, as well as in How Fiction Works, that the moral effects of our encounter with other “minds” are what make fiction valuable to us a form or genre of writing. And if Wood doesn’t much dwell on the “cultural” issues or implications of the fiction he considers, his selection of works or writers to assess and the consistent return to his core concerns related to narrative strategy and the portrayal of character signal a clear desire to “instruct” readers how to read fiction for what it most importantly has to offer.

more from Daniel Green at The Quarterly Conversation here.

Lewis Lapham in The Nation:

The question that tempts mankind to the use of substances controlled and uncontrolled is next of kin to Hamlet’s: to be, or not to be, someone or somewhere else. Escape from a grievous circumstance or the shambles of an unwanted self, the hope of finding at a higher altitude a new beginning or a better deal. Fly me to the moon, and let me play among the stars; give me leave to drown my sorrow in a quart of gin; wine, dear boy, and truth.

That the consummations of the wish to shuffle off the mortal coil are as old as the world itself was the message brought by Abraham Lincoln to an Illinois temperance society in 1842. “I have not inquired at what period of time the use of intoxicating liquors commenced,” he said, “nor is it important to know.” It is sufficient to know that on first opening our eyes “upon the stage of existence,” we found “intoxicating liquor recognized by everybody, used by everybody, repudiated by nobody.”

The state of intoxication is a house with many mansions. Fourteen centuries before the birth of Christ, the Rigveda finds Hindu priests chanting hymns to a “drop of soma,” the wise and wisdom-loving plant from which was drawn juices distilled in sheep’s wool that “make us see far; make us richer, better.” Philosophers in ancient Greece rejoiced in the literal meaning of the word symposium, a “drinking together.” The Roman Stoic Seneca recommends the judicious embrace of Bacchus as a liberation of the mind “from its slavery to cares, emancipates it, invigorates it, and emboldens it for all its undertakings.”

More here.

More than three-quarters of the food consumed in the United States today is processed, packaged, shipped, stored, and sold under artificial refrigeration. The shiny, humming stainless steel box in your kitchen is just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak—a tiny fragment of the vast global network of temperature-controlled storage and distribution warehouses cumulatively capable of hosting uncounted billions of cubic feet of chilled flesh, fish, or fruit. Add to that an equally vast and immeasurable volume of thermally controlled space in the form of shipping containers, wine cellars, floating fish factories, international seed banks, meat-aging lockers, and livestock semen storage, and it becomes clear that the evolving architecture of coldspace is as ubiquitous as it is varied, as essential as it is overlooked.

more from Nicola Twilley at Cabinet here.

Around the time of Noma’s opening, Redzepi and Meyer, along with other young chefs, drafted a New Nordic cuisine manifesto (because you simply can’t have a movement without a manifesto). They called for, among other things, “purity, freshness, simplicity, and ethics,” much like an earlier influential Danish artistic movement with a manifesto, the Dogme 95 film movement led by Lars von Trier. The New Nordic chefs promoted the sole use of seasonal, Scandinavian ingredients—which meant, for instance, no olive oil, no lemons and no pasta—and a return to traditional Scandinavian techniques such as pickling, smoking, curing and fermenting. The idea was to force creativity by setting limitations. Here’s how New Nordic cuisine came to be identified: Ingredients such as sea-buckthorn or Douglas fir or gooseberries or deep-fried moss; cellared or slow-cooked vegetables and under-ripe fruit; dishes served on pieces of wood, rocks, seashells and tree branches; a focus on fish and veggies, rather than meat.

more from Jason Wilson at Table Matters here.

Carlo Strenger in Haaretz:

Judith Butler has rightly been described as an academic superstar. She is one of the most quoted scholars in the humanities, and has also acquired fame − or notoriety, depending on one’s viewpoint − as a political activist. She has been highly critical of Israel’s occupation policy, describes herself as an anti-Zionist, and endorses the BDS movement, which advocates boycotting and divesting from Israel and imposing sanctions against it.

“Parting Ways” is Butler’s latest book, and she states its goal right at the outset: She wants to make a case for a specifically Jewish critique of Israeli state violence. Furthermore, she wants to make a case for “Jewish values of cohabitation with the non-Jew that are part of the very ethical substance of diasporic Jewishness.”

More here.

Reading is without question an extreme city, a trait seemingly encouraged by plan rather than circumstance. Concurrent with the slow death of passenger rail, the West Shore Bypass roadway was built to allow traffic to avoid the downtown area entirely. This ensured not only the starvation of many small businesses, but an urban version of the isolation that you might find in a remote rural village. In elementary school I experienced the city as a place one drives over on the way to the mall or a restaurant. Only occasionally would my parents take me downtown, a trip which involved traveling over or under a bridge no matter the approach (Reading is bound by river or mountain on all sides). At Christmas we would go to the Reading Symphony Orchestra to watch their rendition of The Nutcracker. Mid-year my mother might drag me to a specialty vendor that the suburbs couldn’t or wouldn’t host. I remember annual visits to a vacuum cleaner repair shop and a ceiling fan store. And then there were bureaucratic issues that could only be resolved in the Reading City courthouse, probably dropping off taxes or some kind of professional licensing. But I remember thinking the building was big and old and beautifully out of place.

more from Chris Reitz at n+1 here.

From The Washington Post:

I write by stealing time. The hours in the day have never felt as if they belonged to me. The greatest number has belonged to my day job as a physician and professor of medicine — eight to 12 hours, and even more in the early days. Lest it sound as if I resent my day job, I have to say that my day job is the reason I write, and it has been the best thing for me as a writer. Indeed, when I am asked for writing advice, which is rare, I offer this: Get a good day job, one that you love, preferably one that consumes you and that puts your boat out in the river of life. Then be passionate about it, give it your all, get good at what you do. All that gives you plenty to write about, and it also takes the pressure off the writing. Counting on writing to pay the mortgage or your kid’s college tuition is decidedly risky.

The next lien on time is held by family. I know, if I were being PC, I’d list family before work. But I’m being truthful. The current obsession for parents to be everything to their children, from purveyor of Mozart in utero to muse, coach, camp counselor and chauffeur to as many enriching activities as one can afford ultimately produces parents who accomplish too little at work. I wonder if it produces children who are more accomplished than the parents who had none of these things. (There, I said it. Someone must.)

More here.

John Horgan in Scientific American:

I’m pondering complexity again. The proximate cause is the December 11 launch at my school, Stevens Institute of Technology, of a Center for Complex Systems & Enterprises. The center’s goal is “to enable deep understanding of complexity and create innovative approaches to managing complexity.” This rhetoric reminds me of the Santa Fe Institute, a hotbed of research on complex systems, which I criticized in Scientific American in June 1995 in “From Complexity to Perplexity.” Speakers at the Stevens event include a mathematician I interviewed for that article, John Casti, who has long been associated with the Santa Fe Institute. The event’s organizers asked a few professors in the College of Arts & Letters, my department, to offer some concluding comments on complexity. I jumped at the chance, because I’m fascinated by the premise of complexity studies, which is this: Common principles underpin diverse complex systems, from immune systems and brains to climates and stock markets. By discovering these principles, we can learn how to build much more potent, predictive models of complex systems. Here are some points I hope to make on December 11:

*Researchers have never been able to agree on what complexity is. The physicist Seth Lloyd has compiled a “non-exhaustive” list of more than 40 definitions of complexity, based on thermodynamics, information theory, linguistics, computer science and other fields. Can you study something if you’re not sure exactly what it is?

More here.

They Are Coming
.

Gogo watches timorous
through a rent in her curtain
as the kids boil down the street.

Minutes ago
a terrified woman ran past
bleeding, dress torn,
yelling
THEY ARE COMING!

In an instant the streets were empty
of even the wind
only the yelling
cadres of national sovereignty
wielding dread in upraised little fists
like that man they admire
on the front
of their T-shirts

Gogo fears for her only son
she told him not to go –
but leaving
he told her “the country will never be a colony again”

He is leading the toyi toyi towards her home
sweating faces set
feet pumping
stones and sticks raised
teeth bared
with intention.

by Chris Mlalazi
publisher PIW, 2008