Andrew O'Hagan in the London Review of Books:

Good reporters go hunting for nouns. They want the odd verb too, but the main thing is the nouns, especially the proper ones, the who, what and where. The thing British schoolchildren call a ‘naming word’ was, for Hemingway, a chance to reveal what he knew, an opportunity to be experienced, to discriminate, and his style depends on engorged nouns, not absent adjectives. But at times it strikes you that the cult of specificity in Hemingway is a drug you take in a cheap arcade: lights flash on the old machines and a piano plinks overhead. One evening it came to me as a small revelation that he takes too much pride in the nouns. (And pride ruined him.) He never takes nouns for granted. He invests his whole personality in them, because nouns are the part of speech where a person gets to show off. Papa gets busted on the nouns because he can’t place them on the page without ego. Too often they are there to attract attention. To cause a sensation. To make a blaze. Hemingway will never say someone had a drink when he can say they had a vermouth.

You can have fun with this. In A Farewell to Arms, there are forty occasions when someone has a drink. It begins in Gorizia, where our hero, Frederic Henry (he’d better have his name; we’re going to be with him for a while), sits watching the snow falling while he drinks a bottle of Asti with a friend. Later, over too much wine and Strega, he explains to a priest his regret at not having gone to Abruzzi. The first time he is at the villa housing the British Hospital he is upstairs drinking two glasses of grappa with Rinaldi. He later tells a group of people about a drinking competition – on this occasion, red wine – he got into with a salesman from Marseille. At the dressing station, he sits with one of the medical captains. ‘He offered me a glass of cognac.’ A page after that, stuck in the dugout with a basin of macaroni, he is drinking from a canteen of wine. He has a swallow just as the mortar that will injure him lands in the dugout. ‘Bring him a glass of brandy,’ says the doctor who first treats him. (Rinaldi brings him a bottle of cognac that afternoon.) And when the priest comes to visit him he brings not any old bottle. ‘This is a bottle of vermouth,’ he says. ‘You like vermouth?’

More here.

IN HIS 2003 book, Human Accomplishment: Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 BC to 1950, Charles Murray argued that the great artistic and scientific accomplishments were overwhelmingly European. ”What the human species is today,” he wrote, “it owes in astonishing degree to what was accomplished in just half a dozen centuries by the peoples of one small portion of the northwestern Eurasian land mass.” This claim, which goes against the modern grain of the world history community – indeed, against fashionable belief; The New York Times unsurprisingly called it “more bluster than rigor” and “unconvincing” 1 – was nonetheless the first attempt to quantify “as facts” the creative genius of individuals in terms of cultural origin and geographic distribution. Murray did this by calculating the amount of space allocated to these individuals in reference works, encyclopedias, and dictionaries. Based on this metric, he concluded that “whether measured in people or events, 97 percent of accomplishment in the sciences occurred in Europe and North America” from 800 BC to 1950. Murray’s inventories of the arts also confirmed the overpowering role of Europe, particularly after 1400.

more from Ricardo Duchesne at The Fortnightly Review here.

IN THE FALL OF 2013 OR 2014, if not before, we’ll probably be reading a novel about Occupy Wall Street. What would such a book look like, and what would it tell us about money? You can bet the narrator will be omniscient and the telling panoramic. If half the action takes place in and around Zuccotti Park—where the hardened core of the cast squats, drumming, deliberating, echoing announcements—the rest will be scattered about the newsrooms, boardrooms, barrooms, and bedrooms of Manhattan, with excursions to Williamsburg or Long Island City or Hoboken, maybe even Staten Island, convenient by ferry, and surely suburbs to the north such as Greenwich, cradle of the 1 percent. But beyond journalistic attention to the protests’ throbbing center and the fissures extending up the avenues, how to dramatize it all? A class-clashing love triangle would do it. A twenty-eight-year-old woman drifts down to the park. She’s radicalized in mind—what’s just about a system that’s saddled a hardworking designer like her with constant revolving credit-card debt and a mountain of student loans?—and in heart by an anarchist she meets at a people’s assembly.

more from Christian Lorentzen at Bookforum here.

From the Sydney Morning Herald:

Facebook's sliding stock price has at least one hedge fund manager predicting a dismal decade ahead for the social network.

“In five to eight years they are going to disappear in the way that Yahoo has disappeared,” Ironfire Capital founder Eric Jackson told the CNBC show Squawk on the Street.

“Yahoo is still making money, it's still profitable, still has 13,000 employees working for it, but it's 10 per cent of the value that it was at the height of 2000,” Jackson added. “For all intents and purposes, it's disappeared.”

So how exactly does Jackson see Facebook's power eroding by decade's end? He says it will be the continued emergence of the mobile web — and Facebook's struggle to adapt to that paradigm shift.

More here.

Cat

What are you doing there, cat?
What ambiguity have you come to look at?
Master of yourself, cautious, you wend
your way, testy and always in disguise,
hiding what, in fact, you haven’t got and I must lend
to you, oh cat, nightmare slow and quick,
soft, puffy fur, ice cold eyes.

Of what obscure force are you the dwelling place?
What crime have you witnessed and in what spot?
What god gave you your sudden claw
that signs in red this hand, that face?
Oh cat, accomplice to a fearful law
still without words, without a plot,
who are we, your owners or your slaves?

by Alexandre O’Neill
from Poesias Completas
publisher: Assírio & Alvim, Lisbon, 2000
translation: 1998, Alexis Levitin

Original Portuguese after the jump

Read more »

From Smithsonian:

The chickens that saved Western civilization were discovered, according to legend, by the side of a road in Greece in the first decade of the fifth century B.C. The Athenian general Themistocles, on his way to confront the invading Persian forces, stopped to watch two cocks fighting and summoned his troops, saying: “Behold, these do not fight for their household gods, for the monuments of their ancestors, for glory, for liberty or the safety of their children, but only because one will not give way to the other.” The tale does not describe what happened to the loser, nor explain why the soldiers found this display of instinctive aggression inspirational rather than pointless and depressing. But history records that the Greeks, thus heartened, went on to repel the invaders, preserving the civilization that today honors those same creatures by breading, frying and dipping them into one’s choice of sauce. The descendants of those roosters might well think—if they were capable of such profound thought—that their ancient forebears have a lot to answer for.

Chicken is the ubiquitous food of our era, crossing multiple cultural boundaries with ease. With its mild taste and uniform texture, chicken presents an intriguingly blank canvas for the flavor palette of almost any cuisine. A generation of Britons is coming of age in the belief that chicken tikka masala is the national dish, and the same thing is happening in China with Kentucky Fried Chicken. Long after the time when most families had a few hens running around the yard that could be grabbed and turned into dinner, chicken remains a nostalgic, evocative dish for most Americans. When author Jack Canfield was looking for a metaphor for psychological comfort, he didn’t call it “Clam Chowder for the Soul.”

How did the chicken achieve such cultural and culinary dominance?

More here.

From The Independent:

It begins as a tender love letter to the sons who have given her the “greatest, most enriching adventure of all”– motherhood. But, writes Joumana Haddad, there is something she needs to tell her two boys as they become adults. She is tired. Tired of the never-ending battle of the sexes, of being made to feel guilty for working, of faking orgasms, of commitment-phobic partners, of worrying about her appearance, and of not initiating sex for fear of being labelled aggressive or pushy. “We (women, most of us),” she writes in her new book, “are tired of you (men, most of you) seeing us as only your mothers, your daughters, your sisters, your lovers, your wives, your properties, your accessories, your servants, your toys … we are tired of you needing us to cover up with a black cloak, or to over-expose ourselves like cheap sex objects, in order for you to feel secure in your manhood.”

Peter Bach in The New York Times:

Doctors were told last month that we should stop doing so many screenings for prostate cancer with the prostate-specific antigen test. We learned that sigmoidoscopy is a cheaper, easier and effective alternative to colonoscopy for colon cancer screening. And a study I led turned up strong evidence that routine lung cancer screenings are justified only for people at high risk because of heavy smoking in the past. Regular mammograms aren’t necessary for women in their 40s and are needed only every two years for women ages 50 to 74, the United States Preventive Services Task Force has decided. For many women, Pap smears are required only every three years, not every year, the group also says now. This deluge of do-less recommendations results from research into tests and procedures that have been arguably overused. You’d think these pronouncements would bring a sea change in the way patients are treated in this country. But my guess is that little will change. Many doctors, maybe most, will ignore these findings and keep doing what they have been doing all along.

More here.

Hope

Hope, ya ould mutt, I hear yer in bits.
I heard somebody stomped on yer throat an all ya can do now is grunt.
I heard six drunk jocks set ya on fire while ya were goofin.
Ya ould trout! Ya look like ya were washed up in an oilspill.
There’s only a seepin raw hole in yer face
instead uv a nose since yer septum fell out. Yer still snortin though.
Yuv more tracks than the DART. Yuv every disease known tuh rats.
Ya got herpes, shingles an worms. Ya got flyswarms, maggots an lice. Cockroaches
crawlin all over ya groupthink Tiocfaidh ár lá.
St Vincin De Paul wud rejeck ya. Yud have Augustine out on the lock.
St Francis’d turn away yodellin.
This time it ain’t jus a scare ya might really be dyin.
Even the French seem tuh have banned ya, blottin yer puss with the law.
Yemen is bleedin from multiple wounds tuh revive ya.
Mosly, here in zombied Ireland, I can’t even see ya, yer such a famished fuckin wraith.
Ya flicker in an out uv the view, accept no particular shape, like steam from a pipe or a
backalley splodge that can’t be washed off.
I know ya wanna give up. I know yer only hope may be tuh dissolve, become a puddle or a
rock, sit it out for a new geological era.
I know yuv ten millin ex-loves tuh attend tuh in wrecks uv the deep, coffin-ships an u-
boats an steamships o seaweed an flutin bones for ya.
I know yuv a hundurd millin virgin spouses pushin up slums an high-tech factories from
underneath the battlefields.
Tis tuh the dead we can never repay yud mos jusly return, who rose an were crushed for
yer dreamin, the manygod that manytimes gave ya generation. But I ain’t ready tuh let ya
go jus yet.
So get up. Get up. I said GET THE FUCK UP! And c’mere and give us a hug and give us a peck
on the cheek and give us a drag on yer spliff.
I know how beat up an used up an ugly ya are and yer only visible when I ain’t right-
minded.
But tis senses that matter, tis vision an touch.
I cudden do either if I cudden with you.
I cudden love nothin if I cudden love you.

Everyone claims Edmund Burke as his patron saint, political forefather, lodestar and compass point, ancestral bulwark against the tide of whatever seething modern ill he despises. The right wing trumpets Burke, who excoriated the murderous rebellion in France; the left wing salutes Burke, who excoriated his imperial colleagues for their overweening and rapacious greed in India and America; Christians celebrate Burke, who considered religion a crucial and indispensable pillar of civic life; the Irish savor a native son who became, as Hazlitt noted, “the chief boast and ornament of the English House of Commons”; the English honor the writer and orator of “transcendant greatness,” as Coleridge wrote, with his usual casual attention to spelling. But Edmund Burke the actual man is faded away—the man his wife called Ned, fond of vulgar puns and lewd jokes, an ample man, thin as a lad and then never again; the chatterbox “never unwilling to begin to talk, nor in haste to leave off,” as Samuel Johnson said (probably with a tinge of self-recognition); the man whose first schooling was in a ruined castle in rural Cork, because Catholics were forbidden education under imperial law; the man who lost one son early and the other too soon; the man who would launch into such furious and vituperative speech in Parliament that his friends would have to haul him down into his seat by his coattails; the man “quick to offend [but] ready to atone,” in his own words; the man whose one refuge from politics and creditors, friends and enemies, passions and plots, was a tiny “root-house,” as he called it, a mile from his heavily mortgaged estate house through the Buckinghamshire woods—a “tea-house,” as a young friend described the place, set amid “roots of trees, moss, and so forth, with a … little kitchen behind and an ice-house under it.”

more from Brian Doyle at The American Scholar here.

Moonrise Kingdom is set on an island, but its director Wes Anderson has always seemed like someone who insisted on a small off-shore existence. This is not uncommon in American movies, or necessarily forbidding: Josef von Sternberg lived on a glowing island where the light and its shadows fell on the face of a woman, ideally Marlene Dietrich, because Sternberg had loved her and been humiliated by her. Howard Hawks preferred to find an enclosed cockpit of intense talk and action—the airfield in Only Angels Have Wings or the court newsroom in His Girl Friday. The cattle drive in Red River seems set against epic American landscapes, with changing light and weather, but it’s really a camp that could wander on forever. Woody Allen haunts the streets and interiors of what looks like Manhattan, but he clutches his overcoat island of solipsism. In the same way, Wes Anderson has always been drawn to isolated worlds inhabited by adults who are lost children. In Moonrise Kingdom, in and off the shore of a fabled New England, there are storms coming.

more from David Thomson at TNR here.

Jeremy Waldron’s new book, “The Harm in Hate Speech,” might well be called “The Harm in Free Speech”; for Waldron, a professor of law and political theory at New York University and Oxford, argues that the expansive First Amendment we now possess allows the flourishing of harms a well-ordered society ought not permit. Waldron is especially concerned with the harm done by hate speech to the dignity of those who are its object. He is careful to distinguish “dignity harms” from the hurt feelings one might experience in the face of speech that offends. Offense can be given by almost any speech act — in particular circumstances one might offend by saying “hello” — and Waldron agrees with those who say that regulating offensive speech is a bad and unworkable idea. But harms to dignity, he contends, involve more than the giving of offense. They involve undermining a public good, which he identifies as the “implicit assurance” extended to every citizen that while his beliefs and allegiance may be criticized and rejected by some of his fellow citizens, he will nevertheless be viewed, even by his polemical opponents, as someone who has an equal right to membership in the society. It is the assurance — not given explicitly at the beginning of each day but built into the community’s mode of self-presentation — that he belongs, that he is the undoubted bearer of a dignity he doesn’t have to struggle for.

more from Stanley Fish at The Opinionater here.

“They are a sort of champagne cup of motion, those Astaires. They live, laugh and leap in a world that is all bubbles.” So wrote the New York Sun in 1927, reviewing Funny Face, a hit stage musical starring Fred Astaire and his sister, Adele. Fred continues to be acclaimed as one of the greatest dancers who ever lived, especially for his magnificent 1930s screen partnership with Ginger Rogers, but throughout the 1920s Fred and his elder sister, Adele, were the toast of the transatlantic musical stage. Indeed, during the Astaires’ almost three decades of theatrical collaboration, it was Adele who was routinely viewed as the bigger star and the greater talent. It is hard to believe that Kathleen Riley’s The Astaires is the first full-length study of the celebrated partnership that so defined 20th-century musical comedy. As Riley argues, the pairing of Astaire and Rogers was only made possible by Fred’s prior, and formative, collaboration with Adele.

more from Kathleen Riley at The New Statesman here.

The irony of the latest wave of evolutionist fervour is that there can no longer be any doubt that evolution is a value-free process. We know a great deal more than was known a century ago: while there remain questions about the mechanism of natural selection, Darwin’s true achievement – to expel purpose and design from nature – is more secure that it has ever been. A process of drift governed by chance and necessity, natural selection contains nothing that can satisfy the hunger for meaning. Yet once again, evolution has become a secular religion. ‘By any conceivable standard,’ Wilson intones, ‘humanity is far and away life’s greatest achievement. We are the mind of the biosphere, the solar system, and – who can say? – perhaps the galaxy.’ It is a declaration reminiscent of Teilhard de Chardin’s proclamation of the Omega Point, the end-state of maximum complexity and consciousness to which the Jesuit thinker believed the cosmos was evolving. However, unlike Wilson, the Harvard founder of sociobiology, the renegade man of the cloth understood that he was promoting not science but a heterodox brand of mysticism. When people look to religion for the meaning of life, they eventually find mystery. When they look to science for meaning they end up in mere incoherence. Memes – the conceptual units that in some popular accounts drive what is described as cultural evolution – are no more actually existing things than was phlogiston. But there are surely tropes that recurrently distort thinking, and the notion that evolution can be our guide in ethics and politics is one of them.

more from John Gray at Literary Review here.

Ten years later, Pamuk came up with an insane plan: to write a novel in the form of a museum catalogue, while simultaneously building the museum to which it referred. The plot of the novel would be fairly straightforward: over many years, an unhappy lover contrives to steal a large number of objects belonging to his unattainable beloved, after whose untimely death he proceeds to buy her family’s house and turn it into a museum. You might think that Pamuk’s first step, as a writer, would have been to start writing. In fact, his first step was to contact a real-estate agent. He needed to buy a house for his future heroine, Füsun. During the 1990s, Pamuk visited hundreds of properties, trying to imagine Füsun and her parents living in them. It was beyond his means to purchase a whole building in Nişantaşi, the posh neighbourhood inhabited by Kemal, the hero of the novel. He could afford a single floor in a stone building in the old Ottoman commercial centre of Galata, but then the remodelling would be difficult. The beautiful rundown wooden houses near the old city walls were the right price, but those were in religious neighbourhoods, and this was a novel about the secular middle classes. In 1998, Pamuk finally bought a three-storey wooden house in Çukurcuma. Füsun, the petulant beauty, was thus neither a Nişantaşi socialite nor the scion of Galata bankers, but an aspiring actress living with her seamstress mother and schoolteacher father. The heroine’s socioeconomic position and much of her character were determined by real estate.

more from Elif Batuman at the LRB here.

Amanda Shubert in Critics at Large:

Can a filmmaker obsessed with machismo also be feminist? With Sam Peckinpah, you wonder. His luminous westerns – Ride the High Country (1962), The Wild Bunch (1969), The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970) and Junior Bonner (1972) – are lyric meditations on machismo. They’re about cowboys, outlaws, drifters and rodeo stars caught in a changing world, and the last flaring up of their spirits before they are pinioned by the machinery of that change. But they are also about how those men relate to the women they encounter on their journeys, women, like them, trapped by circumstance and fighting to retain some glimmer of their humanity. The gloriously spacious landscapes of the American west (shot in each case by Lucian Ballard), with the teeming blues and yellows of wide skies and sweeping country, express the paradoxical entrapment these characters feel, their longing to break free and their uncertainty of what they’d be breaking free to, but they also infuse the movies with a kind of moral spaciousness. The characters, male and female, have room to be who they are, without judgment before the eyes of the camera. That’s the romanticism of Peckinpah’s westerns, and it often comes out in romantic plots that bring together pairs of lovers in sublime meetings of equals.

It’s not exactly that Peckinpah stands out among the work of other American New Wave directors for his sensitivity to female experience – not in a generation that includes Robert Altman (McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Thieves Like Us), Arthur Penn (Bonnie and Clyde, Alice’s Restaurant), Robert Towne (Personal Best) and Brian De Palma (Carrie, Blow Out). It’s the way he gets at that experience that is so unusual and so dazzling. I can’t think of another filmmaker who can refract a feminist sensibility through male, at times misogynistic, perspectives.

More here.

Sughra Raza. Self-portrait on a street in Prague, 2006.

Digital photograph.

Mohsin Hamid at his own website:

My sister Nissa and I arrive in Delhi Airport. There was a time when being in Delhi Airport was a lot like being in Lahore Airport or Karachi Airport. No longer. The new version is impressive and efficient and ultra-modern and tasteful. (“Our fast bowlers are still a hell of a lot better,” I console myself, “even the ones who aren't in jail.”) Nissa and I exchange a glance at customs. Our suitcases are packed with props to make a Delhi film set look like a real Lahori street: posters, flags, fliers. We have a copy of a letter granting government permission to film in Delhi. But we don't relish the idea of explaining to an Indian customs officer why we, a pair of Pakistanis, are bringing in a bunch of political-looking banners in Urdu. Luckily no-one opens our bags. I turn on my phone and get an email from an Indian friend who says the local press is full of stories about the movie. She sends a photo of a newspaper as an attachment. There are pictures of Mira Nair (the director), Riz Ahmed (the lead actor), and Meesha Shafi (who plays Riz's sister, and who will be flying back to Lahore in a couple hours on the same plane that brought us in). As for the “exclusive” details about the film exposed in the article, well, they're mostly pretty far off. There is, for example, no “border-crossing-into-India scene” and Om Puri's character isn't “a village thakur.” At least I hope not. Better get my hands on a copy of the latest script fast.

More here.

Steven Pinker in Slate:

Nature or nurture. Love it or leave it. If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.

If you didn’t already know that euphonious dichotomies are usually phony dichotomies, you need only check out the latest round in the supposed clash between “prescriptivist” and “descriptivist” theories of language. This pseudo-controversy, a staple of literary magazines for decades, was ginned up again this month by The New Yorker, which has something of a history with the bogus battle. Fifty years ago, the literary critic Dwight Macdonald lambasted the Third Edition ofWebster’s New International Dictionary for aiming to be “a recording instrument rather than … an authority” and insufficiently censuring such usages as “deprecate” for depreciate, “bored” fordisinterested, and “imply” for infer. And in a recent issue, Joan Acocella, the magazine’s dance critic, fired a volley of grapeshot at the Fifth Edition of the American Heritage Dictionaryand at a new history of the controversy by the journalist Henry Hitchings, The Language Wars. Acocella’s points were then reiterated this week in a post by Ryan Bloom on the magazine’s Page-Turner blog. The linguistic blogosphere, for its part, has been incredulous that The New Yorker published these “deeply confused” pieces. As Language Log put it, “Either the topic was not felt to be important enough to merit elementary editorial supervision, or there is no one at the magazine with any competence in the area involved.”

According to the sadly standard dichotomy, prescriptivists believe that certain usages are inherently correct and others inherently incorrect, and that to promote correct forms is to uphold truth, morality, excellence, and a respect for the best of our civilization. To indulge incorrect ones, meanwhile, is to encourage relativism, vulgar populism, and the dumbing down of literate culture.

Descriptivists, according to this scheme, believe that norms of correctness are arbitrary shibboleths of the ruling class, designed to keep the masses in their place. Language is an organic product of human creativity, and the people should be given the freedom to write however they please.

More here.