But the other impulse, much exercised by Renaissance encyclopaedists in picture and in text, is mystical: a revelation from broad sampling. So a trip through the welter of detail (say an eclectically stocked botanical garden or a menagerie) might yield an epiphany of cosmic “Wow”: the harmonic connection ties the discrepancies of the world together with a single ribbon of meaning. OK, this may not happen when you peruse a bulb catalogue, or the Yellow Pages, or the Top Hundred vampire movies, but don’t say that I – or Plato – didn’t warn you if it does. In the meantime, especially in these lean times, why not just lie back and wallow in Eco’s bath of superabundance, and enjoy what he calls the motiveless “poetics”, by which he means, he eventually confesses, the pure joy of aimless excess. After all, how can you not be thankful for a book that supplies both a complete list of the names of angels – including, naturally, Iachoroz, Onomataht and Xanoryz – and Rabelais’ comprehensive guide to the wherewithal for wiping one’s bum? But be warned, Yuletiders, geese are involved.

more from Simon Schama at the FT here.

When I walked into the Strand Bookstore in Manhattan last week, I headed straight for the bright young thing who wore an “Ask Me” button, and asked her to point me to the section of the store where I might find Sarah Palin’s memoir, “Going Rogue: An American Life.” She looked at me as if I had requested a copy of “Mein Kampf” signed in blood by the author, and directed me to the nearest Barnes and Noble, where, presumably, readers of dubious taste and sensibility could find what they wanted. A few days later, I attended a seminar on political and legal theory where a distinguished scholar observed that every group has its official list of angels and devils. As an example, he offered the fact (of which he was supremely confident) that few, if any, in the room were likely to be Sarah Palin fans. By that time I had begun reading Palin’s book, and while I wouldn’t count myself a fan in the sense of being a supporter, I found it compelling and very well done.

more from Stanley Fish at the NYT here.

Was that really a decade that just sputtered by? Granted, everyone was numbed to the teeth for a couple of years after 9/11, but aren’t decades supposed to be demarcated by some sort of discernible content, like techno music, the civil rights movement or cocaine abuse? What can the Zeros claim? The Jonas Brothers? Avatar? Devendra Banhart? The emergence of graphic novels as a viable literary genre? Good TV? Gay marriage? These are all more or less wonderful things, but uniformly retro, cobbled together from surefire crowd-pleasers and reconfigured for today’s a-go-go cyber lifestyle. Where’s the surprise, the indication that something new is afoot — something that might signal a sea change in our culture’s disastrous path of self-destructive materialism, or at least save us from drowning in reassuring pabulum? When I see “The ’00s,” I think “the ooze” — and wonder how to scrape it off.

more from Doug Harvey at the LA Weekly here.

Winter Solstice

Wiry and headstrong in life, so in death,
the bleached stems of harebells
– unflappable as marram grass –
outstare this sun, these easterlies.
At every branchlet’s pendant tip,
the vestigial ribs of a seed capsule
(bell-like, a birdcage in miniature)
accumulate and vitrify a water droplet.

Hence this platinum-wired gem tree
gathering December light, dispensing it;
a crystal-chandelier Adventist
illuminating, galvanising, rather,
its weedy, slug-pearled patch
of lavender and fallen harebell seeds;
igniting, with each icy tug,
summer’s metaphorical touchpaper.

by Jean Bleakney
from The Poet’s Ivy; Lagan Press, 2003

From The Telegraph:

Unrequited love makes fools of many of us. Even so, is it normal behaviour to collect 4,213 of your beloved’s cigarette butts – to say nothing of 237 hair clips, 419 lottery tickets and hundreds of other items you have surreptitiously looted from her family home, which you’ve been visiting every other night for dinner and polite conversation for nine years? And then to build a museum to house all your mementos? At best it’s eccentric, at worst it’s creepy – but Orhan Pamuk won’t hear a word of it. The Nobel laureate’s reluctance to condemn Kemal, the love-struck narrator of his latest novel, is understandable. For if Kemal’s behaviour is odd, what does that say about a novelist who is building a real museum in Istanbul to recreate the imaginary one in his book? Pamuk – animated, garrulous and jovial in person, his eyebrows shooting up expressively with every other pronouncement – insists he should not be confused with the moony protagonist of The Museum of Innocence, his eighth novel and first since winning a Nobel Prize for literature in 2006. Still, they seem to have more in common than the fact that both turned their backs on bourgeois Istanbul upbringings.

Sprawled on a leather sofa in his office at Columbia University in New York, where he spends four months of the year lecturing, Pamuk, 57, clearly enjoys being asked to discuss spurned lovers and collecting mementos. Given that in 2008 some fellow Turks were accused of plotting to kill him and, five years ago, prosecutors wanted to imprison him for “insulting Turkishness”, it’s a step forward for this controversial writer. “So many women readers in Istanbul have asked me, their eyes shining: ‘Is Kemal you?’,” he says, grinning. “To an extent, clearly yes, all lovers behave like this. And when women ask this, I think their tender smiles suggest they’re happy about their power to make men fall in love.”

More here.

From The New York Times:

Time gets special consideration today. We sweep out the old and ring in the new, take stock, dust off some of those perennial resolutions and maybe even formulate one or two new ones. Depending on your age and the way things have been going lately, this annual rite is not necessarily easy. So take refuge in art. There may be no better place — no place more stimulating or ultimately more comforting — to contemplate life’s forward motion than a large museum, especially the great time machine that is the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Met is closed today while most of us take a collective timeout for time, but — at least for now — there’s always tomorrow.

In a way it seems a trifle odd that artworks are such superb instruments of time travel. Time is not visual, after all, unlike space. And most works in museums are static, unchanging objects. And yet art is loaded and layered with different forms of time and complexly linked to the past and the present and even the future. The longer they exist the more onionlike and synaptic they become.

More here.

Mark Buchanan in New Scientist:

Good stories need rich characters that we care about, not mathematical theorems, however fascinating. So a work of fiction subtitled A mathematical novel makes you fear that it may only expose the tremendous difficulty of blending science and logic with the emotion and dramatic tension required of good literature. Fortunately, in this case that fear is misplaced, because A Certain Ambiguity succeeds both as a compelling novel and as an intellectual tour through some startling mathematical ideas.

Just before his death, Indian mathematician Vijay Sanhi entices his grandson, Ravi, into the world of numbers via one of its mysteries. Punch any three digits into your calculator, he tells Ravi. Then punch in the same three again. No matter which digits you choose, he claims, the resulting six-digit number will be exactly divisible by 13, that result divisible by 11, and the last result by 7. You will always end up with the same three-digit number you started out with. Amazed to find this is true, Ravi soon works out why (a clue: 13 × 11 × 7 = 1001), and falls in love with mathematics.

More here.

From a joint statement by the editors of the Jang Group and The Times of India:

The Times of India Group and the Jang Group [Pakistan] have come together to energize the process of peace between our two countries. We believe that this is an intervention whose time has come. We recognize that setbacks will occur but these should not derail the process. We will need to reach out and pluck the low hanging fruit in the beginning before we aim higher. Issues of trade and commerce, of investments, of financial infrastructure, of cultural exchanges, of religious and medical tourism, of free movement of ideas, of visa regimes, of sporting ties, of connectivity, of reviving existing routes, of market access, of separated families, of the plight of prisoners, will be part of our initial agenda. Through debates, discussions and the telling of stories we will find commonalities and space, for compromise and adjustment, on matters that have bedevilled relations for over 60 years.

When the two neighbours meet they move almost seamlessly into the shared cultural and human ethos. They talk to each other about food, about music, about poetry, about films, about theatre and about the prolonged absences spawned by lost years. They share anxieties, discuss rising prices, seek advice on their children’s education, gossip about their in-laws, trade anecdotes and laugh at the foibles of politicians. We want to lower the walls so that the conversation continues. We have to nurture the seeds of peace that have nestled, untended, for decades in hostile soil.

We owe our unborn generations the right to rise out of the depths of poverty, and squalour.

More here. [Thanks to Ruchira Paul.]

From Harvard Magazine:

Don’t be misled: n+1 is not a math quarterly. It’s a twice-yearly literary magazine whose first issue declared, in 2004, “We are living in an era of demented self-censorship…a time when a magazine like Lingua Franca can’t publish, but Zagat prospers.” Seven issues later, at more than 200 pages apiece, the Brooklyn-based n+1 continues to air trenchant views. “Pointed, closely argued, and often brilliantly original critiques of contemporary life and letters,” wrote A.O. Scott in the New York Times Magazine, describing n+1’s enterprise as “a generational struggle against laziness and cynicism.” Even intellectuals in Europe have championed it: theater director Alessandro Cassin, in Milan’s Diario, for example, cited n+1’s “brand of intellectual bravery that has its roots in magazines like T.S. Eliot’s Criterion and the Partisan Review.”

More here.

From Nature:

Nature is pleased to name physicist Steven Chu, Nobel laureate and the US Secretary of Energy, as its Newsmaker of the Year.

Steven Chu made his name — and earned his Nobel prize — by developing an ingenious laser technique for capturing and studying atoms. He is an extraordinary experimentalist who loves the challenges of the lab. But five years ago, he embraced a much bigger challenge when he took the helm at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California and dedicated it to clean-energy research. Chu was sworn in as secretary of the US Department of Energy this January, and is now charged with transforming the way the world's largest economy powers itself. That is why Nature has selected Chu as its Newsmaker of the Year.

Chu has already had a significant impact. From his position near the top of President Barack Obama's administration, he has helped make the case that the United States must commit to reducing its greenhouse-gas emissions, not only to save the planet but also to ensure that the country will be able to compete with China, India and Europe in the emerging green economy.

More here.

I didn’t know until a friend told me that if you squeeze a dried bunch of lavender the tickly sharp scent is released all over again. Pips that fall away can be gathered and bundled into sachets, squeezed again months later, and your head aches with memories you’ve not even recalled till now, the scent as piercingly fine as at the beginning. Certain pictures release the same kind of charge. The soft, glowing languor of Watteau’s group of watchmen in The Portal of Valenciennes in the Frick; the gusting dread in the Met’s picture by Millet (untypical for him) of wild turkeys in an autumn windstorm; the Manet in the Barnes of sailors tarring a boat: the paint doesn’t look like torch-fire, it is torch-fire, and the boat under repair is the picture we’re looking at right now being painted and repainted. But one I’ve lived with longest, the one that has watched me over the arc of many years, is a small self-portrait Tintoretto made at the age of twenty-three that hangs in Philadelphia. I saw it when I was twenty years old, and I only recently realized how I’ve clung to its presence as I’ve gone about the work of making my life. It’s always the same but keeps changing up on me. I never could resist the picture’s brash daring—his over-the-shoulder stare says: Just watch what I can do.

more from W. S. Di Piero at Threepenny Review here.

America is at once that rare thing, a complex cliché, and something all too familiar, a set of contradictions: “one nation under God, indivisible”, but with a dozen varieties of Christianity, the product of Puritanism and the Enlightenment, a colony-turned-superpower equally defined by acts of violence and belief in freedom, isolationism and interventionism, conformity and self-reliance. And yet most of us have no trouble understanding the idea of an essential, even stable America, and possess what the critic Greil Marcus has called “a sense of what it is to be an American; what it means, what it’s worth, what the stake of life in America might be”. The interplay between America’s heterogeneity and its aspiration to coherence is captured in the wording of the Declaration of Independence (“one people”), in the system of government (a federal republic), even in its adopted name (United States). But if we prefer not to think of these as contradictions, if America is a paradox rather than a hypocrite, if it possesses unity despite its divisions, then this is due to a distinctive process, something not quite covered by the terms “polity” or “democracy” or “melting pot”.

more from Leo Robson at The New Statesman here.

The late J. G. Ballard was famous for living in suburbia, Shepperton to be precise. He thought it odd that anyone should think this odd. The suburbs were, in his view, the logical subject for any writer seeking to track shifts in culture, for the important post-war cultural trends had started there. The ’burbs were where it was at; they were socially as well geographically edgy, to use the sort of language he wouldn’t have used. It is hard to think of a more unfashionable claim. To the intelligentsia, the suburbs were and always have been the place where nothing happens, or nothing good. While the fates of the city and the countryside vex every bien-pensant breast, nobody pays much attention to the people who live in between, except to finger them as the Enemy. Lewis Mumford, in his heyday as the urban guru, declared that the flight to the suburbs “carries no hope or promise of life at a higher level”. D. H. Lawrence wrote in Kangaroo of the “utterly uninteresting” suburbs of Sydney (where he had been for all of a fortnight): those myriads of bungalows offered “no inner life, no high command, no interest in anything, finally”. From Byron to Graham Greene and Cyril Connolly, the “leafy middleclass suburbs” have been denounced as smug, small-minded and spiritually derelict.

more from Ferdinand Mount at the TLS here.

For You to Understand

To be a jacket
To be a slave
To be a stepladder
To be forsaken
For you to understand
You must have a disability

To be a breast of money
For those who are abled
And be the belt
For civil servants
And be a grass mat for feet
The feet of the rich
The feet of the wealthy
For you to understand
You must have a disability

And ask for help day and night
No one will listen
The government and community
They all emphasize
They emphasize your worthlessness
And you also feel worthless
But for you to understand
You must have a disability

Discrimination has become obvious
To be undermined
People see a disability
And do not see a person
But for you to understand
You must have a disability

by Bongekile Joyce Mbanjwa

translation by Siphiwe ka Ngwenya
from Izinhlungu Zomphefumula
publisher Botsotso, Johannesburg, 2008

This is really funny! Please watch:

[Thanks to Zaneb Khan Beams.]

John Matson in Scientific American:

On December 5 John Baez, a mathematical physicist at the University of California, Riverside, posted a collection of images of polynomial roots by Dan Christensen, a mathematician at the University of Western Ontario, and Sam Derbyshire, an undergraduate student at the University of Warwick in England.

Polynomials are mathematical expressions that in their prototypical form can be described by the sum or product of one or more variables raised to various powers. As a single-variable example, take x² – x – 2. This expression is a second-degree polynomial, or a quadratic, meaning that the variable (x) is raised to the second power in the term with the largest exponent (x²).

A root of such a polynomial is a value for x such that the expression is equal to zero. In the quadratic above, the roots are 2 and –1. That is to say, plug either of those numbers in for x and the polynomial will be equal to zero. (These roots can be found by using the famous quadratic formula.) But some roots are more complex. Take the quadratic polynomial x² + 1. Such an expression is only equal to zero when x² is equal to –1, but on its face this seems impossible. After all, a positive number times a positive number is positive, and a negative number times a negative number is positive as well. So what number, multiplied by itself, could be negative?

More here, including slide show.

From the New York Review of Books:

By my present stage of decline, I am thus effectively quadriplegic. With extraordinary effort I can move my right hand a little and can adduct my left arm some six inches across my chest. My legs, although they will lock when upright long enough to allow a nurse to transfer me from one chair to another, cannot bear my weight and only one of them has any autonomous movement left in it. Thus when legs or arms are set in a given position, there they remain until someone moves them for me. The same is true of my torso, with the result that backache from inertia and pressure is a chronic irritation. Having no use of my arms, I cannot scratch an itch, adjust my spectacles, remove food particles from my teeth, or anything else that—as a moment's reflection will confirm—we all do dozens of times a day. To say the least, I am utterly and completely dependent upon the kindness of strangers (and anyone else).

During the day I can at least request a scratch, an adjustment, a drink, or simply a gratuitous re-placement of my limbs—since enforced stillness for hours on end is not only physically uncomfortable but psychologically close to intolerable. It is not as though you lose the desire to stretch, to bend, to stand or lie or run or even exercise. But when the urge comes over you there is nothing—nothing—that you can do except seek some tiny substitute or else find a way to suppress the thought and the accompanying muscle memory.

But then comes the night.

More here.