Grammar

You can’t talk yet, and you’re not
too put out about that.
Words send you into convulsions,
especially verbs – the Imperative Mood
is the funniest thing you’ve ever heard.
Wake up. Go asleep. Do. Don’t. Be.

You have your own lingo
any fool could understand,
even a linguist, given time.
Grin. Yowl. Gurn.
Yawn. Grunt. Silence
that makes perfect
sense to everyone.

You’re behind schedule
according to doctors’ charts,
the childish child experts.
But if you learn, and I’m afraid you will,
as many words as there are rules of grammar
in the libraries of An Gúm

you won’t say a blessed thing
worth anything more
than what you’ve already learned
in the womb’s elocution room,
the punctuation of laughter back to front,
the declension of rain into tears.

by Louis De Paor

from: Clapping in the Cemetery;
Publisher: Cló Iar-Chonnachta, Indreabhán, 2005

From The New York Times:

The private eyes of classic American noir dwell in a moral shadow land somewhere between order and anarchy, principle and pragmatism. They’re too unruly to be cops and too decent to be crooks, leaving them no natural allies on either side but attracting enemies from both. Their loneliness resembles that of cowboys, those other mournful individualists who pay for their liberty with obscurity, and it makes them at least as intriguing as their cases, which usually start as tales of greed and lust but tend to evolve into dramas of corruption that implicate lofty, respected institutions and indict society itself.

What allows the detectives to penetrate these schemes is not their intelligence, chiefly, but their autonomy. Private eyes are skeptics and outsiders, their isolation the secret of their vision. Doc Sportello, the mellow gumshoe hero of Thomas Pynchon’s “Inherent Vice” — a psychedelic homage to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler set in the last days of hippie-era Los Angeles, after the Manson murders have spoiled the vibe — lives, like his old-school models, on the margins, unaffiliated and unencumbered. His funky little hometown, Gordita Beach, is perched on the edge of the Pacific Ocean, its back turned squarely on America, both geographically and culturally.

More here.

Nicholson Baker in The New Yorker:

I ordered a Kindle 2 from Amazon. How could I not? There were banner ads for it all over the Web. Whenever I went to the Amazon Web site, I was urged to buy one. “Say Hello to Kindle 2,” it said, in tall letters on the main page. If I looked up a particular writer on Amazon—Mary Higgins Clark, say—and then reached the page for her knuckle-gnawer of a novel “Moonlight Becomes You,” the top line on the page said, “ ‘Moonlight Becomes You’ and over 270,000 other books are available for Amazon Kindle—Amazon’s new wireless reading device. Learn more.” Below the picture of Clark’s physical paperback ($7.99) was another teaser: “Start reading ‘Moonlight Becomes You’ on your Kindle in under a minute. Don’t have a Kindle? Get yours here.” If I went to the Kindle page for the digital download of “Moonlight Becomes You” ($6.39), it wouldn’t offer me a link back to the print version. I was being steered.

Everybody was saying that the new Kindle was terribly important—that it was an alpenhorn blast of post-Gutenbergian revalorization. In the Wall Street Journal, the cultural critic Steven Johnson wrote that he’d been alone one day in a restaurant in Austin, Texas, when he was seized by the urge to read a novel. Within minutes, thanks to Kindle’s free 3G hookup with Sprint wireless—they call it Whispernet—he was well into Chapter 1 of Zadie Smith’s “On Beauty” ($9.99 for the e-book, $10.20 for the paperback). Writing and publishing, he believed, would never be the same. In Newsweek, Jacob Weisberg, the editor-in-chief of the Slate Group, confided that for weeks he’d been doing all his recreational reading on the Kindle 2, and he claimed that it offered a “fundamentally better experience” than inked paper did. “Jeff Bezos”—Amazon’s founder and C.E.O.—“has built a machine that marks a cultural revolution,” Weisberg said. “Printed books, the most important artifacts of human civilization, are going to join newspapers and magazines on the road to obsolescence.”

More here.

From this dubious core, however, the film sprawls in improbable directions, becoming, among other things, Tarantino’s most explicit movie about the movies to date. A French Jew (Melanie Laurent) escapes a death squad and reinvents herself as the proprietress of a Paris movie house, only to find herself romanced by a young German war hero and budding film star (Daniel Bruhl) who plays himself in a Nazi propaganda film. Meanwhile, another German star, Bridget von Hammersmark (a very good Diane Kruger), is conspiring with the Allies against Hitler, her primary contact being a British commando (Michael Fassbender) who is also a film critic (!) and an expert on German cinema. (One of Tarantino’s better inside jokes is to have the German-born Fassbender playing a Brit who impersonates a Nazi and jeopardizes the mission with his imperfect accent.) There is a discussion regarding whether Joseph Goebbels (Sylvester Groth), who among other duties oversaw the German film industry, preferred to be compared to Louis B. Mayer or David O. Selznick. Several characters are named in homage to B-movie stars (Raine, a play on Aldo Ray, and Hugo Stiglitz among them), and the Italian western and crime-film director Enzo G. Castellari, who directed the original 1978 Inglorious Bastards (from which this movie borrowed its title but nothing else), has a cameo as a mid-century version of himself. The whole affair culminates with a massive, murderous set piece at the movie house, which testifies to the purifying power of film as a political medium and film stock as a combustion agent.

more from Christopher Orr at TNR here.

James Ensor is the master of the mask—literally. In Self-Portrait with Masks (1899), the artist paints himself in the middle of a carnival throng. Only the heads are visible in the perspective, the bodies blocked by an agglomeration of weird and scary faces. Near the center of the canvas is the artist himself, looking a little apprehensive, but very human in comparison to the ghouls, demons, monsters and skulls hemming him in on all sides. The painting begs questions about an artist who never managed to fit in. No wonder his anti-heroic stance inspired the alternative rock band, They Might Be Giants, to cut their 1994 single, “Meet James Ensor.” The song title isn’t ironic. Although Ensor is well known in Belgium—the old 100 Franc bank note even sported his portrait —his fame does not always spread beyond Northern Europe.

more from Dawn-Michelle Baude at artcrtical here.

A cinephile would have to delve deep into the industry vaults of spooled monochrome to find a more beautiful ongoing collaboration than that developed by director Guy Maddin and actress Isabella Rossellini. The best comparisons would, no doubt, include the sensual ennui of Monica Vitti reified through the lens of Antonioni or the baroque stare of Liv Ullmann captured in the snow-globe world of Bergman. Few images are more excitingor iconographic than the female form, frenzied or subdued. While this cinematic tradition has been explored in Roland Barthes’s ode to the face of Garbo—which he compares to “mystical feelings of perdition”—it is Jean-Luc Godard’s glib observation that is the most quotable: “The history of cinema is boys photographing girls.” In contrast to the patriarchal tradition that enjoined the elder, virile artist with his female ingénues, the Maddin/Rossellini relationship is a thoroughly postcoital affair. From their first collaboration in The Saddest Music in the World (2003) to their most recent loop Send Me to the ’Lectric Chair (2009), they have consistently traded gendered representations of masculine power for a bunco scam of sexual aporias. As a director and an actress whose bond might very well be called “epicene,” resistant to the psychology of the domineering male artiste but also shedding the habiliments of dowager feminism, their creative romance resides in androgyny.

more from the chat at Bomb Magazine here.

Veronique Greenwood in Seed Magazine:

In a famous set of experiments in the 1970s, children were observed trick-or-treating in the suburbs. Some were asked their names and addresses upon arriving at a door, while some were asked nothing. All were instructed to take just one piece of candy from the bowl, but as soon as the owner of the home retreated into the kitchen, the children who hadn’t provided their names and addresses shoveled the candy into their bags, sometimes taking everything in the bowl. Psychologists posited that anonymity made the children feel safe from the repercussions of their actions, an effect they call deindividuation.

Moral psychologists have since constructed myriad experiments to probe the workings of human morality, studying how we decide to cheat or to play by the rules, to lie or to tell the truth. And the results can be surprising, even disturbing. For instance, we have based our society on the assumption that deciding to lie or to tell the truth is within our conscious control. But Harvard’s Joshua Greene and Joseph Paxton say this assumption may be flawed and are probing whether honesty may instead be the result of controlling a desire to lie (a conscious process) or of not feeling the temptation to lie in the first place (an automatic process). “When we are honest, are we honest because we actively force ourselves to be? Or are we honest because it flows naturally?” Greene asks.

More here.

A Music

I employ the blind mandolin player
in the the tunnel of the Mètro. I pay him
a coin as hard as his notes,
and maybe he has employed me, and pays me
with his playing to hear him play.

Maybe we're necessary to each other,
and this vacant place has need of us both
––it's vacant, I mean, of dwellers,
is populated by passages and absences.

By some fate or knack he has chosen
to place his music in this cavity
where there's nothing to look at
and blindness costs him nothing.
Nothing was here before he came.

His music goes out among the sounds
of footsteps passing. The tunnel is the resonance
and meaning of what he plays.
It's his music, not the place, I go by.

In this light which is just a fact, like darkness
or the edge or end of what you may be
going toward, he turns his cap up on his knees
and leaves it there to ask and wait, and holds up
his mandolin, the lantern of his world;

his fingers make their pattern on the wires.
This is not the pursuing of rhythm
of a blind cane pecking in the sun,
but is a singing in a dark place.

by Wendell Berry

From The Telegraph:

Margaret Atwood’s smiling face is extraordinarily close to mine. A fraction of a second later and it is further away, held at a different angle. I did not see it move. “I am talking to you remotely because we are social beings and we like to interact,’’ she says. “We like to look at other human beings a lot. Magazines, newspapers, video conferencing, television… spying.’’ We are conversing via a large screen, while an ocean apart; she is in Toronto where it is 6am. The image on my screen is not continuous; rather, it is like a fast sequence of still photographs. Atwood, her eyes bright and humorous, appears very much at ease with the whizz-bang technology.

The uses of technology figure large in her new novel, The Year of the Flood; it is a richly imagined vision of the near-future and is a sister volume to an earlier Booker-shortlisted work, Oryx and Crake. Indeed, some of the characters overlap. Here, through the eyes of two female characters, Toby and Ren, we learn of the days that lead up to a horrible pandemic that ravages humanity – forget coughs and sneezes, here people melt. There is enviro-religion, overweening science, hideous sex clubs, nightmare food, grotesque cosmetic surgery. And there are also bees.

More here.

From Science:

Adventure stories and horror movies ramp up the tension when hapless characters walk in circles. The Blair Witch Project, for example, wouldn't have been half as scary if those students had managed to walk in a straight line out of the forest. But is this navigation glitch real or just a handy plot device? A new study finds that people really do tend to walk in circles when they lack landmarks to guide them. The idea for the study came from a German science television show called Kopfball (literally, “head ball,” as in soccer), which tries to answer viewers' questions, says the study's first author, Jan Souman, a psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany. The producers contacted Souman and his colleagues, who study perception and action, to find out if the common belief about walking in circles was true. “We didn't really know, but we thought it was an interesting question,” Souman says. So the researchers collaborated with the program, resulting in an episode that aired in 2007.

More here.

Neve Gordon in the Los Angeles Times:

The most accurate way to describe Israel today is as an apartheid state. For more than 42 years, Israel has controlled the land between the Jordan Valley and the Mediterranean Sea. Within this region about 6 million Jews and close to 5 million Palestinians reside. Out of this population, 3.5 million Palestinians and almost half a million Jews live in the areas Israel occupied in 1967, and yet while these two groups live in the same area, they are subjected to totally different legal systems. The Palestinians are stateless and lack many of the most basic human rights. By sharp contrast, all Jews — whether they live in the occupied territories or in Israel — are citizens of the state of Israel.

The question that keeps me up at night, both as a parent and as a citizen, is how to ensure that my two children as well as the children of my Palestinian neighbors do not grow up in an apartheid regime.

There are only two moral ways of achieving this goal.

The first is the one-state solution: offering citizenship to all Palestinians and thus establishing a bi-national democracy within the entire area controlled by Israel. Given the demographics, this would amount to the demise of Israel as a Jewish state; for most Israeli Jews, it is anathema.

The second means of ending our apartheid is through the two-state solution, which entails Israel's withdrawal to the pre-1967 borders (with possible one-for-one land swaps), the division of Jerusalem, and a recognition of the Palestinian right of return with the stipulation that only a limited number of the 4.5 million Palestinian refugees would be allowed to return to Israel, while the rest can return to the new Palestinian state.

More here.

Nina Shen Rastogi in Slate:

Back in the 1980s, when the Lantern herself was just a little penlight, acid rain was the environmental scourge of the day. Canada's environmental minister proclaimed it an “insidious malaria of the biosphere“; it menaced the Transformers; it turned Kimberly's hair bright green in an episode of Diff'rent Strokes. Toxic precipitation fell off the radar in 1990, when Congress passed an amendment to the Clean Air Act calling for major reductions in the types of emissions that lead to acid rain. Emissions have dropped significantly since then, but the problem is far from gone.

Acid rain occurs when sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides—gases released by the burning of fossil fuel—form acidic compounds in the atmosphere. These fall back to earth in rain, snow, or sleet or as dry particles or gases. (At high altitudes and along coastlines, bits of acid suspended in clouds or fog pose an additional threat.)

Back in acid rain's heyday as a public menace, scientists focused on how it wrecked lakes and streams, making the water toxic to fish and other organisms and threatening sensitive tree populations like the red spruce in the Northeast mountains. In later years, they began to understand how acidification can also cause imbalances in soil chemistry, exacerbating problems for watersheds and plant life.

More here.

Cassandra Willyard in Science:

Don't hate those people who are perky and efficient after only a few hours of sleep. They can't help it. New research suggests that a genetic mutation may explain why some people sleep less.

Researchers don't know exactly why some people do fine with as little as 4 hours of sleep a night, while others need 12. “We've believed for a long time that there's a genetic basis,” says Paul Shaw, a neurobiologist at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. But scientists have only recently begun to ferret out which genes are responsible.

In 2001, geneticist Ying-Hui Fu and colleagues identified a mutation in a gene called Per2 that appeared to cause familial advanced sleep-phase syndrome (FASPS). People who have this condition sleep a normal 8 hours, but they go to bed earlier than most people, retiring at 6 or 7 in the evening and waking at 3 or 4 in the morning. “After that was published, a lot of these people [with unusual sleep schedules] came to us,” says Fu, who is now at the University of California, San Francisco. “So we started to collect DNA samples.” The team now has genetic information from more than 60 families.

More here.

Karan Thapar interviews Jaswant Singh in IBN Politics:

Monday sees the publication of a biography of Mohammed Ali Jinnah which challenges the way we in India have seen the founder of Pakistan. It reassess Nehru's role in Partition, it sheds fresh light on the relationship between the Mahatma Gandhi and Jinnah.

Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Jaswant Singh’s book is likely to attract considerable attention and may be even a fair amount of controversy. Karan Thapar, in a special two-part interview with the author, discusses the book with Singh, a former defence, foreign and finance minister of India and also a former soldier.

Karan Thapar: Mr Jaswant Singh, let's start by establishing how you as the author view Mohammed Ali Jinnah? After reading your book, I get the feeling that you don't subscribe to the popular demonisation of the man.

Jaswant Singh: Of course, I don't. To that I don’t subscribe. I was attracted by the personality which has resulted in a book. If I wasn't drawn to the personality, I wouldn't have written the book. It's an intricate, complex personality of great character, determination.

More here. [Thanks to Ruchira Paul.]

Cohen began his musical career suspended between song and speech. In 1967, “Songs of Leonard Cohen” introduced listeners to Cohen’s strong nasal tenor, which suited the casual roué he conjured on songs like “Suzanne” and “So Long, Marianne.” The production is spare: mostly acoustic instruments and, at Cohen’s request, no drums. Though he is working in Bob Dylan’s shadow, his manner is more relaxed and his visions are slightly less gnomic: “I lit a thin green candle, to make you jealous of me. But the room just filled up with mosquitoes—they heard that my body was free,” he sings, in “One of Us Cannot Be Wrong.” An unadorned style has served Cohen’s albums best, the voice clean and clearly audible. In 1977, for the album “Death of a Ladies’ Man,” Cohen’s uneasy collaboration with the producer Phil Spector—who excluded him from the final mixing sessions—resulted in a dreadful mix of pop, country, and some weird variant of disco. (Cohen later called it “grotesque.”) By the time of “I’m Your Man,” which came out in 1988, Cohen was composing on keyboard rather than on his nylon-string acoustic guitar. Synthesizers add a bright and lapidary quality that doesn’t always fit the lyrics. But the songs—about desire and aging—are stunning, and Cohen’s voice has shed its honking quality and grown darker and looser, like a tire ripped open.

more from Sasha Frere-Jones at The New Yorker here.

Flaubert thought Stoke-on-Trent was called Stoke-on-Trend, a happy delusion which would have amused Arnold Bennett. Bennett admired Balzac, Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant and Emile Zola, and wrote to André Gide in 1920 that he suspected the French tended to despise English fiction as “rather barbaric, lacking in finesse and civilized breadth”. (In correspondence with Gide, he displayed a tendency to defend his own artistic credentials and aspirations to modernity. With other correspondents, he sometimes adopted a worldlier stance, though he never lapsed into the philistinism which some of his comic characters so triumphantly display.) French realism and its successor naturalism were, when Bennett was young, the avant-garde, and some of their freedoms were deeply shocking to what he called the BP (the British Public). The BP lagged far behind the French. It is startling to discover that Bennett was asked to remove the line “I am going to have a baby” from the serialization of one of his later novels in 1922. It is true that Flaubert and Zola had run into serious trouble with censorship, but not quite of this simplistic nature. It was Bennett’s misfortune that during his lifetime realism came to be seen not as radical but as reactionary. Its groundbreaking efforts were dismissed en bloc by some younger critics, as a self-conscious modernism began to push towards the centre stage. Bennett was a very trend-conscious man, both for good and ill, and much disliked the notion of being classed as one of the old guard. He preferred the young.

more from Margaret Drabble at the TLS here.