Danse Russe

If when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
and the sun is a flame-white disc
in silken mists
above shining trees,
if I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mirror
waving my shirt around my head
and singing softly to myself:
“I am lonely, lonely.
I was born to be lonely,
I am best so!”
If I admire my arms, my face,
my shoulders, flanks, buttocks
against the yellow drawn shades,
Who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my housedhold?

by William Carlos Williams, 1917

From The Telegraph:

Spies, generals and ambassadors will pounce on this book, poring over its pages for clues to a way out of the Afghan morass. They will be disappointed, and perhaps dismayed as well. Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, a founder of the Taliban in 1994 and a minister during its short-lived regime, has much to say about the wars in Afghanistan and the roles he has played in them. As a teenage refugee from the Soviet invasion, he joined the mujahideen, and a few years later was fighting alongside Mullah Omar when the future Taliban leader lost an eye.

He has written a fascinating account of his own remarkable life which gives real insight into why the Taliban was formed, what motivates it, and what it is now trying to achieve. It is what he has to say about hopes of ending the current war, however, that will be of most interest to the spooks and diplomats in Kabul, Washington and London; they will have been hoping that Mullah Zaeef would point the way towards a negotiated end to the fighting. But he does not, and what he has to say suggests that ending the bloodshed could prove extremely difficult, if possible at all.

More here.

Michael Shermer in Scientific American:

Imagine a time in your life when you felt out of control—anything from getting lost to losing a job. Now look at the top illustration on this page. What do you see? Such a scenario was presented to subjects in a 2008 experiment by Jennifer Whitson of the University of Texas at Austin and her colleague Adam Galinsky of Northwestern University. Their study, entitled “Lacking Control Increases Illusory Pattern Perception,” was published in Science.

Defining “illusory pattern perception” (what I call “patternicity”) as “the identification of a coherent and meaningful interrelationship among a set of random or unrelated stimuli … (such as the tendency to perceive false correlations, see imaginary figures, form superstitious rituals, and embrace conspiracy beliefs, among others),” the researchers’ thesis was that “when individuals are unable to gain a sense of control objectively, they will try to gain it perceptually.” As Whitson explained the psychology to me, “Feelings of control are essential for our well-being—we think clearer and make better decisions when we feel we are in control. Lacking control is highly aversive, so we instinctive­ly seek out patterns to regain control—even if those patterns are illusory.”

More here.

Sidney Mintz in the Boston Review:

Every medium of communication in the world is now overrun with pronouncements about Haiti. Many have been ill-informed, and a few maliciously intemperate. The extreme comments have the effect of making those that are mildly reasonable in tone seem more reliable; some, more so than they deserve. The New York Times, for instance, editorializes about Haiti’s “generations of misrule, poverty and political strife,” as if those nouns were enough to explain the history of Haiti.

Nations have beginnings, and then national histories, and the history of each is unique. I know how obvious that is. But the penchant among journalists and political scientists for creating phony categories such as “kleptocracies,” “developing nations,” and “failed states,” and then using these categories to obstruct serious talk, in this case about Haiti, immobilizes us and conceals the need to uncover the weight of local and particular history.

The New World’s second republic has indeed known political strife, bad leadership, and poverty. But to judge Haiti fairly, it is essential to remember that the country won its independence under the worst imaginable circumstances. The Haitians declared their freedom in 1804, when the New World was mostly made up of European colonies (and the United States) all busily extracting wealth from the labor of millions of slaves. This included Haiti’s neighbors, the island colonies of France, Great Britain, Denmark, and The Netherlands, among others. From the United States to Brazil, the reality of Haitian liberation shook the empire of the whip to the core. Needless to say, no liberal-minded aristocrats or other Europeans joined the rebel side in the Haitian Revolution, as some had in the American Revolution.

The inescapable truth is that “the world” never forgave Haiti for its revolution, because the slaves freed themselves.

More here.

From the BBC:

When men spend the night with a bed mate their sleep is disturbed, whether they make love or not, and this impairs their mental ability the next day.

The lack of sleep also increases a man's stress hormone levels.

According to the New Scientist study, women who share a bed fare better because they sleep more deeply.

Professor Gerhard Kloesch and colleagues at the University of Vienna studied eight unmarried, childless couples in their 20s.

Each couple was asked to spend 10 nights sleeping together and 10 apart while the scientists assessed their rest patterns with questionnaires and wrist activity monitors.

The next day the couples were asked to perform simple cognitive tests and had their stress hormone levels checked.

More here. [Thanks to Kris Kotarski.]

Jennifer Oullette in Discovery News:

Cosmology suffered a great loss yesterday with the passing of Andrew Lange, co-leader of the BOOMERang experiment, which provided the first experimental evidence that our universe is flat, and offered strong support to the supernova evidence for dark energy. Lang was a professor of physics at Caltech, and that tight-knit community is reeling from the news that Lange apparently took his own life. I only met Lange once, but my husband Sean, a Caltech colleague, knew him well and offers his own eulogy (of sorts) over at Cosmic Variance:

It’s hard to convey how unexpected and tragic this news is. Very few people combined Andrew’s brilliance as a scientist with his warmth as a person. He always had a sparkle in his eye, was enthusiastically in love with science and ideas, and was constantly doing his best to make Caltech the best possible place, not just for himself but for everyone else around him. He was one of the good guys. The last I spoke with him, Andrew was energetically raising funds for a new submillimeter telescope, organizing conferences, and helping plan for a new theoretical physics center. We are all walking around in shock, wondering how this could happen and whether we could have done anything to prevent it.

The only way I can think to honor Lange is to tell you a bit more about his most famous work. BOOMERang stands for Balloon Observations Of Millimetric Extragalactic Radiation and Geophysics, and it's essentially a balloon-borne telescope designed to make measurements of the cosmic microwave background radiation — the “afterglow” of the Big Bang that still pervades our universe. The first flight, in 1997, concentrated on North America, while two subsequent flights in 1998 and 2003 circled the South Pole.

More here.

Catherine Bennett in The Guardian:

There is still time to sign up for one of the most rational dates of 2010: next week's mass homeopathy overdose. At 10.23am on Saturday 30 January, anti-homeopathy activists, organised by the Merseyside Skeptics Society, will down entire bottles of homeopathic remedies outside branches of Boots, the better to demonstrate that these preparations are worthless.

Even though sales of Hahnemann's potions are likely to be unaffected, there remains a chance that the survival of hundreds of sceptics might persuade officials at Nice, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, to re-examine the funding of homeopathy within the NHS. It remains one of the world's great mysteries that the health service, with its austere, cash-strapped commitment to evidence-based medicine, should continue to spend an estimated £4m a year on sugar pills. Just a few months ago, it refused to prescribe an effective liver cancer drug, because it would not be “cost-effective”.

More here. [Thanks to Lindsay Beyerstein.]

A 24th-century digital archaeologist peers back through the murk of time to the early 21st, seeking, amid the welter of sounds, images, objects, the perfectly emblematic object or personification of that remote and fevered time. Such a symbol, she assumes, must be an image or an artefact, for no one except antiquarians could imagine that ancient screeds of print could have anything to say about the epoch now known as DigiOne. She pauses for a moment in her memory archive, arrested by names with a cultic ring to them, presumably typical of archaic cyber-time: Gaga, Kaka, Banksy, Bono? But then up through the ether shimmies a dazzling apparition, tagged to 2007, a diamond-encrusted skull, fashioned by one D Hirst, entitled “For the Love of God” and, apparently, exhibited in a White Cube. Noticing that shortly after it was given to the world, the financial citadels of capitalism crumbled in panic, she writes a memo to self: “Poss blogothesis? ‘Diamond, Cube, Sphere: Solid Forms in the Age of Meltdown?’” For it can’t be fortuitous that the skull, with its mega-carat cranial studs, was produced at the tipping point of what historians came to call the Great Derivative Delirium?

more from Simon Schama at the FT here.

When, one evening in 1976, Philip K. Dick invited Tim Powers to his Fullerton apartment, the Cal State student expected the kind of night he often passed with the science-fiction titan: a wide-ranging conversation, fueled by wine and beer, about religion, philosophy and Beethoven. The night began the usual way. But it took a strange turn as Dick’s wife, Tessa, and her brother began grabbing lamps and chairs. “She and her brother were carrying things out of the house,” recalls Powers. “I said, ‘Phil, they’re taking stuff, is this OK?’ ” ” ‘Powers, let me give you some advice, in case you should ever find yourself in this position,’ Dick said. ‘Never oversee or criticize what they take. It’s not worth it. Just see what you’ve got left afterward, and go with that.’ “And then,” Powers recalls, “her brother said, ‘Could you guys lift your glasses? We want the table.’ ”

more from Scott Timberg at the LAT here.

Europe’s geopolitical map, just 20 years after the breach of the Berlin Wall, looks like a foregone conclusion today — the natural upshot of Communism’s demise and the spread of liberal democracy. The Central Europeans are snugly in the European Union; NATO presides over a largely peaceful continent; and though spats between the West and an authoritarian Russia occasionally flare, this is surely understandable given all the givens. But this order of things was hardly inevitable, as Mary Elise Sarotte, a professor of international relations at the University of Southern California, reminds us in “1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe.” Between the wall’s opening (November 1989) and Germany’s unification (October 1990), history lurched forward with no fixed destination. Sarotte describes a host of competing conceptions of post-cold-war Europe that flourished, mutated and perished in the maelstrom of events that led up to German unity. In the end, the visions of President George H. W. Bush and Chancellor Helmut Kohl prevailed — which may not necessarily have been the best of all possible outcomes, though Sarotte stops short of this conclusion.

more from Paul Hockenos at the NYT here.

Daniel Mendelsohn in The New Yorker:

In August of 1929, Sigmund Freud scoffed at the notion that he would do anything as crass as write an autobiography. “That is of course quite an impossible suggestion,” he wrote to his nephew, who had conveyed an American publisher’s suggestion that the great man write his life story. “Outwardly,” Freud went on, perhaps a trifle disingenuously, “my life has passed calmly and uneventfully and can be covered by a few dates.” Inwardly—and who knew better?—things were a bit more complicated:

A psychologically complete and honest confession of life, on the other hand, would require so much indiscretion (on my part as well as on that of others) about family, friends, and enemies, most of them still alive, that it is simply out of the question. What makes all autobiographies worthless is, after all, their mendacity.

Freud ended by suggesting that the five-thousand-dollar advance that had been offered was a hundredth of the sum necessary to tempt him into such a foolhardy venture. Unseemly self-exposures, unpalatable betrayals, unavoidable mendacity, a soupçon of meretriciousness: memoir, for much of its modern history, has been the black sheep of the literary family. Like a drunken guest at a wedding, it is constantly mortifying its soberer relatives (philosophy, history, literary fiction)—spilling family secrets, embarrassing old friends—motivated, it would seem, by an overpowering need to be the center of attention. Even when the most distinguished writers and thinkers have turned to autobiography, they have found themselves accused of literary exhibitionism—when they can bring themselves to put on a show at all. When Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “Confessions” appeared, shocking the salons of eighteenth-century Paris with matter-of-fact descriptions of the author’s masturbation and masochism, Edmund Burke lamented the “new sort of glory” the eminent philosophe was getting “from bringing hardily to light the obscure and vulgar vices, which we know may sometimes be blended with eminent talents.” (The complaint sounds eerily familiar today.) When, at the suggestion of her sister, Virginia Woolf started, somewhat reluctantly, to compose an autobiographical “sketch,” she found herself, inexplicably at first, thinking of a certain hallway mirror—the scene, as further probing of her memory revealed, of an incestuous assault by her half-brother Gerald, an event that her memory had repressed, and about which, in the end, she was unable to write for publication.

From The New York Times:

The Egyptian Islamist theoretician Sayyid Qutb believed the West — in particular the United States — posed an existential threat to Islam. He feared that globalization, spearheaded by the American colossus, might eventually destroy Islam by tempting pious Muslims with freewheeling capitalism, the separation of religion from government and the unleashing of decadent “animalistic desires.” Qutb, in word and in deed, took up the sword against Gamal Abdel Nasser’s secular government. Nasser hanged him in 1966, but Qutb’s ideas transformed the world by inspiring Osama bin Laden’s Qaeda theology. Vali Nasr, in his outstanding new book “Forces of Fortune,” shows that Qutb was at least half wrong. Globalization, free trade and market economics aren’t a threat to Islam per se. What they are a threat to is the totalitarian vision of Islam that Qutb’s followers hope to impose.

Nasr, a professor at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy of Tufts University, writes that the Middle East will liberalize when it is transformed by a middle-class commercial revolution. “The great battle for the soul of Iran — and for the soul of the region as a whole — will be fought not over religion, but over business and capitalism,” he says. What he calls the “Dubai effect” is only just beginning to be felt around the region. The cutting-edge skyscrapering emirate is hardly a normal society; neither is it a democracy or (as we now know) a country free of its own economic problems. But middle-class people from all over the Muslim world continue to travel there; they admire its business-friendly regulatory environment and its respect for personal liberty. They often go home and wonder why their own countries are so poorly governed.

More here.

Abigail Ticker in Smithsonian Magazine:

Venus flytraps’ considerable eccentricities have confined them to a 100-mile-long sliver of habitat: the wet pine savannas of northern South Carolina and southern North Carolina. They grow only on the edges of Carolina bays and in a few other coastal wetland ecosystems where sandy, nutrient-poor soil abruptly changes from wet to dry and there’s plenty of sunlight. Fewer than 150,000 plants live in the wild in roughly 100 known sites, according to the North Carolina Department of Environment and Natural Resources.

Instead of absorbing nitrogen and other nutrients through their roots, as most plants do, the 630 or so species of carnivorous plants consume insects and, in the case of certain Southeast Asian pitcher plants of toilet-bowl-like proportions, bigger animals such as frogs, lizards and “the very, very occasional rodent,” says Barry Rice, a carnivorous plant researcher affiliated with the University of California at Davis. The carnivores are particularly abundant in Malaysia and Australia, but they’ve also colonized every state in this country: the Pine Barrens of coastal New Jersey are a hot spot, along with several pockets in the Southeast. Most varieties catch their prey with primitive devices like pitfalls and sticky surfaces. Only two—the Venus flytrap and the European waterwheel, Aldrovanda vesiculosa—have snap traps with hinged leaves that snag insects. They evolved from simpler carnivorous plants about 65 million years ago; the snap mechanism enables them to catch larger prey relative to their body size. The fossil record suggests their ancestors were much more widespread, especially in Europe.

More here.

Anthony Lane in The New Yorker:

The year has barely begun, yet we already have a safe bet for best actress of 2010. Jenny, in Jon Amiel’s “Creation,” is certainly a hell of a role, beginning with an action sequence in the nude, switching to a flirtation scene—in which Jenny wears bloomers and a knitted top—with an ardent admirer, and closing with her demise, filmed in unremitting sorrow. So what if she’s an orangutan? A knockout is a knockout, whatever her descent.

In reality, there were two Jennys, both at London Zoo. Queen Victoria was introduced to one of them, in 1842, and pronounced her “painfully and disagreeably human.” One wants to ask: To whose pain, Ma’am, do you refer? The orangutan is one of the many organisms, simple and complex, that pass before Charles Darwin (Paul Bettany), a stratum of whose life is the subject of “Creation.” Bettany, with his jungly sideburns and smooth pate, offers a reasonable likeness of the great man, although he lacks the shaggy overhang of brow, extending far beyond the sunken eye sockets, which lent Darwin not only his solemn frown but, it must be said, his semi-simian air. I sometimes wonder if his tracing of our ancestry began not on his travels, or at his desk, but one morning when he glanced into his shaving mirror.

The book on which Jon Amiel concentrates is “The Origin of Species,” which was published in 1859, having been delayed for many years, and the task of his film is to register the cautionary tremors that preceded the quake. Darwin clearly foresaw the effect of his theories on society at large, especially on the faithful. “You’ve killed God, Sir!” his friend Thomas Huxley (Toby Jones) exclaims, jumping the gun a little.

More here.

I came to the Great Plains looking for history and all I found was failure. It’s so windy here I can hardly stand. I can hardly see. All around me the Saskatchewan prairie grass bends and shivers, to the right, to the left, right, left, looking like it’s trying to find its sea legs. The clouds storm over the gray expanse of sky. The prairie is indifferent. It has looked the same for many years to many people, promising abundance and delivering the opposite. I came to find the town of Hoffer, but it’s not exactly clear where Hoffer begins, where I was before, or exactly where I am now. When I ask my family where the farm was, they say Hoffer, but sometimes Oungre, and Sonnenfeld, and around Hoffer, and also around Oungre. All I can see is grass and sky. In the tale of modern North America, the East was for recreating the old, the West was for creating the new, but the Plains just kicked your ass. Even the desert was more inviting than this. The desert calls to the music makers and dreamers of dreams, swimming pools, and movie stars. When the pioneers of yore offered their identities to the desert, it filled the void with romance. You went to the prairies, on the other hand, if you were trying to prove yourself, work hard. On the Prairie, you sacrificed your identity not for romance but for purpose. On the Prairie, pioneering wasn’t a path, the temporary road to eventual success, it was a lifestyle; identity was at one with the land.

more from Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set here.

Ormesby Psalter

East Anglican School, c. 1310

The psalter invites us to consider
a cat and a rat in relationship
to an arched hole, which we
shall call Circumstance. Out of

Circumstance walks the splendid
rat, who is larger than he ought
to be, and who affects an expression
of dapper cheer. We shall call him

Privilege. Apparently Privilege has
not noticed the cat, who crouches
a mere six inches from Circumstance,
and who will undoubtedly pin

Privilege’s back with one swift
swipe, a torture we can all nod at.
The cat, however, has averted
its gaze upward, possibly to heaven.

Perhaps it is thanking the Almighty
for the miraculous provision of a rat
just when Privilege becomes crucial
for sustenance or sport. The cat

we shall call Myself. Is it not
too bad that the psalter artist
abandoned Myself in this attitude
of prayerful expectation? We all

would have enjoyed seeing clumps of
Privilege strewn about Circumstance,
Myself curled in sleepy ennui,
or cleaning a practical paw.

by Rhoda Janzen

from Poetry, January 2007