I rage against Vincent van Gogh for needing to die at 37, after painting for only ten years. My rants mount when I see work from the last two years of his life, when he was in an amazing state of hellish grace. From February 1888, when he moved from Paris to Arles, to July 27, 1890, when he shot himself, Van Gogh painted a string of staggering masterpieces, including The Night Café and The Starry Night. These two forays into the known, unknown, inner, and outer worlds form the core of MoMA’s “Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night.”

Set aside the show’s muddled logic, the cheesy Andrew Lloyd Webber title, and the pretend rationale that this is anything more than an excuse to bring in crowds. The Night Café and The Starry Night still emit such pathos, density, and intensity that they send shivers down the spine. Whether Van Gogh thought in color or felt with his intellect, the radical color, dynamic distortion, heart, soul, and part-by-part structure in these paintings make him a bridge to a new vision and the vision itself.

more from New York Magazine here.

I had a farm in Africa. Or rather, my mother’s family, the Bothas, had it from the 1940s until the 1990s, and it was the wrong type of farm: not Blixen’s bucolic liberal ideal, but an unprofitable, insular dustpan in the Afrikaner heartland of South Africa’s old Transvaal, near Rysmierbult (Termite Hill). If the adjacent districts of Krugersdorp and Roodepoort were the Afrikaner Bible Belt, then Rysmierbult could be called the buckle – the men on the farm were always loosening theirs to piss outside. This was Boer territory, where the men were manne and the women were supposed to produce children for the manne, and koeksusters for the church bazaar. In fact, though, my grandfather, Oupa Frikkie Botha, was not really a farmer at all, but a schoolteacher of Latin and maths with a dangerous fondness for Virgil. Hence the farm. And, as it turned out, he couldn’t do the maths. In spite of generous government subsidies, the mielies didn’t multiply. The sheep didn’t fatten. The peaches rotted. The dream of rural self-sufficiency failed.

more from Granta here.

I know no faster way to divide a room of feminists than to utter the word “pornography.” We’re all pretty together on the choice and equal pay issues, and other disagreements have considerable common ground. But when it comes to porn, feminists retreat to their dogma. There is the camp that derides pornography as violence against women and believes it causes men to dehumanize women. This is, admittedly, a small (and mostly aging) group, but they are vocal and they like to write books. There is another group, the sex-positive group, some of whom are sex writers or have created their own pornography. They’re a little embarrassed about the “penetrative heterosexual sex is rape” stance of their predecessors and are trying to create more female-friendly sexual environment in the culture.

(I know that feminists aren’t the only ones divided on this issue, but since I cannot for the life of me understand the idea that God does not want humans to feel pleasure, the religious argument against pornography will not be discussed here.)

more from The Smart Set here.

“You are looking at our virtue,” he says.

After a quick speedboat ride across the Mekong River, Khon directs me to a square pond. On Khon’s signal, a boatman shovels dime-size pellets into the water. A few dimples dot the surface. A splash here and there. Then, as if the entire pond is moving to engulf the skiff, the water erupts into a froth, drenching the boatman and showering those of us on shore. The pond is almost more fish than water. Two-foot-long creatures, gray on top, white on bottom, with faces resembling a slightly dimwitted “Star Wars” character, interlock and wriggle. Appraising the fish, you might feel that the motto for Bianfishco, the company for which Khon works — “Pangasius is our nature”— is slightly creepy. Khon smiles broadly, though, for the roaring of the feeding frenzy is literally the sound of money earning interest.

more from the NY Times Magazine here.

Most have heard by now that yesterday Paul Krugman won the The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.  He is to be congratulated for a much deserved prize, in my opinion, and the Nobel committee is to be congratulated for making a very sensible choice.  (Yes, I have read his scholarly work. And in his role as a public intellectual, he’s a national treasure.) 

A few weeks ago, he wrote the following on his blog:

“I’ve been pointing out that the dictatorial powers Paulson has sought would accrue to the next Treasury secretary, who might well be Phil Gramm. I’ve been trying to come up with a liberal-leaning name who might seem equally horrifying to Republicans, and the only one I’ve come up with is … me.”

I noted to Mark Blyth and/or to Abbas that Krugman’s comment was funny because it was true.  Now, the award of the Nobel seems to have had the same effect, setting some of the rightwing parts of the blogosphere aflame. (I think he’d make a decent Secretary of the Treasury, but of course, he and the Obama camp are not exactly on the most cordial of terms.)  Anyway, first, Kathy G., then Henry Farrell, and Brad Delong started different contests to see who can find the most intense and nutty conniption fits, and episodes of going, er, postal over this prize.  Henry:

It furthermore occurs to me that someone (i.e. Me) should do a comments thread to collate and conserve the very bestest blogposts and comments on the Vast Nobel Prize Conspiracy. My opening bid, from ‘derut’ at The Volokh Conspiracy.

Excellent. He was a pseudo Nobel prize. That he deserves. As his politics is pseudoscientific. Great. Now I can applaude. I am sure many of you have watched him on cable networks. Has anyone else noticed he seems a little off. He speaks like a mouse and his beady eyes have a strange stare. He looks like if someone droped a glass he would scream.

It’s the spellings of ‘applaude’ and ‘droped’ that give it that special something.

From The Telegraph:

“Why,” asks David Loyn in this timely book, has holding Afghanistan always been “far more difficult than taking it?” It’s a pertinent question. In 2001 the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan were forced out in a relatively bloodless war, at least for the US. But seven years on there are more than 50,000 foreign troops in the country, and both the British and US governments plan to increase their military presence even as they reduce troop numbers in Iraq. Few Western journalists know Afghanistan better than Loyn. He was the only TV reporter to witness the Taliban takeover of Kabul in 1996, and as recently as October 2006 was criticised in the House of Commons for interviewing a Taliban commander in Helmand province.

In this survey of 200 years of intervention in Afghanistan, he has detected a constant theme “running from Britain’s first intervention in the early 19th century up to the imposition of democracy after 2001: policy was to be shaped from the outside whatever the local Afghan circumstances”. This inability of foreign invaders to understand Afghan society and politics is, he feels, why history keeps repeating itself.  The most obvious recent example was the misreading of the Taliban when the movement emerged in the Nineties, and during its resurgence in 2006. Or, as the EU representative to Kabul put it in 2007, with the introduction of democracy, “it was not thought necessary for us to understand the tribal system”.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Looking at a cell through an optical microscope is like a satellite view of New York City. You can see Central Park, buildings, streets and even cars, but understanding the cultural and economic life of the city from the distance of Earth orbit is difficult, maybe impossible. Likewise, biologists can easily see large structures inside a cell like the nucleus with its folded-up chromosomes and the energy factories of the mitochondria. But most of the details of how a cell functions — the locations of specific proteins, the mechanisms used by the cell to send messages back and forth, the transportation system that moves proteins from place to place — were too small to be seen.

Nowadays, using the same optical microscopes, biologists can see what was once invisible with the help of a fluorescent protein that is the focus of this year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry. The prize was awarded to Osamu Shimomura of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Massachusetts and Boston University, Martin Chalfie of Columbia University and Roger Y. Tsien of the University of California, San Diego. The protein, known as the green fluorescent protein, or G.F.P., was for years just a biological curiosity from a glowing jellyfish. It was found in the summer of 1961 when Dr. Shimomura, then a researcher at Princeton, and Frank Johnson, a Princeton biology professor, collected 10,000 Aequorea victoria jellyfish in the waters off Friday Harbor in Washington State. They were looking for what made the jellyfish glow at its edges, and from the 10,000 jellyfish they extracted aequorin, a bioluminescent protein that flashes blue when it interacts with calcium.

More here.

McCain lacks the character and temperament to be president. And Palin is simply a disgrace.

Even “single-issue” voter CH sees the light. From Slate:

The most insulting thing that a politician can do is to compel you to ask yourself: “What does he take me for?” Precisely this question is provoked by the selection of Gov. Sarah Palin. I wrote not long ago that it was not right to condescend to her just because of her provincial roots or her piety, let alone her slight flirtatiousness, but really her conduct since then has been a national disgrace. It turns out that none of her early claims to political courage was founded in fact, and it further turns out that some of the untested rumors about her—her vindictiveness in local quarrels, her bizarre religious and political affiliations—were very well-founded, indeed. Moreover, given the nasty and lowly task of stirring up the whack-job fringe of the party’s right wing and of recycling patent falsehoods about Obama’s position on Afghanistan, she has drawn upon the only talent that she apparently possesses.

More here.

I’ve been calling voters. And I’ve given money. Do your part here.

Anonymous.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

The latest public discussion about the fate of literary criticism features The Literary Darwinists. With articles appearing in The Boston Globe, The Chronicle, The Nation and elsewhere, there’s a certain buzz. Literary Darwinists are reacting to the rather pitiful — and undisputed — state in which literary criticism finds itself. Particularly within the academy, literary studies is floundering as a discipline without a clear sense of how to move forward. A good deal of what’s written is such convoluted nonsense that reading it amounts to self punishment. The critic William Deresiewicz recently wrote an article in which he concluded: “The real story of academic literary criticism today is that the profession is, however slowly, dying.”

Enter the Literary Darwinists, ready to get serious. People who call themselves Darwinists can always, if nothing else, be counted on for their seriousness. They’ve whipped out the scientific method (always intimidating to your everyday literary types) and begun hammering away on the relationship between biology and literature. One-upping the New Critics, who wanted a rigorous method without all the icky scientific procedures and techniques, the Darwinists promise to clean up the nonsense and give us some verifiable facts about what literature does and how it operates. Not such a bad proposition on the face of it. A big part of literature is constituted by people talking about literature, and one of the more enjoyable things on this planet, in my humble opinion, is that ongoing conversation. For that reason alone, the Literary Darwinists are welcome to the party.

More here.

Benjamin Phelan in Seed:

John Hawks started out as a “fossil guy” studying under Milford Wolpoff, a paleoanthropologist who is the leading proponent of the faintly heretical multiregional theory of human evolution. Coming to genetics from such a background has perhaps given Hawks the stomach to wield unfashionable hypotheses. In December of last year, he, Harpending, and others published a paper whose central finding, that evolution in humans is observable and accelerating, would have been nonsensical to many geneticists 20 years ago. Up to 10 percent of the human genome appears to be evolving at the maximum rate, more quickly than ever before in human history.

“Seven percent is a minimum,” Hawks says. “It’s an amazing number,” and one that is difficult to square with the prevailing view of natural selection’s power. Because most mutations have a neutral effect on their carriers, making them neither fitter nor less fit, neither more fertile nor sterile, only slightly different, those changes are invisible to natural selection. They spread or don’t spread through a population by chance, in a process called genetic drift, which is often thought of as the agent of more change than natural selection. But the changes that Hawks detected, if he is correct, are too consistent from person to person, from nationality to nationality, to have been caused by genetic drift alone.

By looking at the data from HapMap, a massive survey of the genetic differences between selected populations from around the world, Hawks identified gene variants, or alleles, that were present in many people’s DNA, but not in everyone’s. These alleles seemed to be moving, over time, through populations in a way that matched mathematical predictions of what natural selection should look like on the genomic level. And though Hawks doesn’t know why possession of the new alleles should be advantageous, he doesn’t need to know. The signature that natural selection inscribes on the genome is legible even when the import of the message is unclear.

Jagdish Bhagwati, John Gray, Garry Kasparov, Qinglian He, Michael Walzer, Michael Novak, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Kay S. Hymowitz, Tyler Cowen, Robert B. Reich, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, John C. Bogle, and Rick Santorum offer answers over at the Templeton Foundation. Robert B. Reich on why we don’t want to know the answer:

Most of us are consumers who try to get the best possible deals in the market. Most of us are also moral beings who try to do the right things in our communities and societies. Unfortunately, our market desires often conflict with our moral commitments. So how do we cope with this conflict? All too often, we avoid it. We would rather the decisions we make as consumers not reflect upon our moral characters. That way we don’t have to make uncomfortable choices between the products and services we want and the ideals to which we aspire.

For example, when the products we want can be made most cheaply overseas, the best deals we can get in the marketplace may come at the expense of our own neighbors’ jobs and wages. Great deals also frequently come at the expense of our Main Streets – the hubs of our communities – because we can get lower prices at big-box retailers on the outskirts of town. As moral actors, we care about the well-being of our neighbors and our communities. But as consumers we eagerly seek deals that may undermine the living standards of our neighbors and the neighborliness of our communities. How do we cope with this conflict? Usually by ignoring it.

Similarly, as moral beings we want to think of ourselves as stewards of the environment, intent on protecting future generations. But as consumers, we often disregard this moral aspiration. Many of us continue to buy cars that spew carbon into the air, and some of us spend lots of time flying from one location to another in jet airplanes that have an even greater carbon footprint. And we often buy low-priced items from poor nations in which environmental standards are lax and factories spill toxic chemicals into water supplies or pollutants into the air. How do we square our moral stand on the environment with our purchasing habits? Beyond buying the occasional “eco-friendly” product, we typically don’t even try.

Our market transactions have all sorts of moral consequences we’d rather not know about.

In Cairo, Tunis and elsewhere along the rim of the Mediterranean, the first headway made by Islamists in the student world occurred initially in technical institutes, then in engineering faculties and finally in scientific universities—in other words in the most modernist sectors and those most exposed to the outside world.

But did our sociologists not tell us that all things religious emanated from the soil, from history and from tradition? Had our historians and philosophers not proclaimed a century ago that technological and scientific progress, industrialization and communications would without doubt erase nationalistic and religious superstitions? Don’t we daily speak about the “opposites” inherited from the 19th century: the sacred vs. the profane, the irrational vs. the rational, archaism vs. modernity, nationalism vs. globalism?

Apparently, we got everything wrong. Our modernist vision of modernity has itself turned out to be only an archaism of the industrial age.

more from NPQ here.

Michael Pollan in the NYT Magazine:

It may surprise you to learn that among the issues that will occupy much of your time in the coming years is one you barely mentioned during the campaign: food. Food policy is not something American presidents have had to give much thought to, at least since the Nixon administration — the last time high food prices presented a serious political peril. Since then, federal policies to promote maximum production of the commodity crops (corn, soybeans, wheat and rice) from which most of our supermarket foods are derived have succeeded impressively in keeping prices low and food more or less off the national political agenda. But with a suddenness that has taken us all by surprise, the era of cheap and abundant food appears to be drawing to a close. What this means is that you, like so many other leaders through history, will find yourself confronting the fact — so easy to overlook these past few years — that the health of a nation’s food system is a critical issue of national security. Food is about to demand your attention.

Complicating matters is the fact that the price and abundance of food are not the only problems we face; if they were, you could simply follow Nixon’s example, appoint a latter-day Earl Butz as your secretary of agriculture and instruct him or her to do whatever it takes to boost production. But there are reasons to think that the old approach won’t work this time around; for one thing, it depends on cheap energy that we can no longer count on. For another, expanding production of industrial agriculture today would require you to sacrifice important values on which you did campaign.

The philosophy of space-time physics is currently in high gear, with outstanding and long-awaited books recently published by Harvey Brown (Physical Relativity) and Robert DiSalle, and others forthcoming soon from Nick Huggett and Oliver Pooley. All of these authors approach their work primarily as philosophers, yet each incorporates historical exegesis quite essentially in the course of making his philosophical case (each, I should add, in a different style and with different aims). This review is about DiSalle’s Understanding Space-Time (US), but due to their overlapping topics and temporal proximity, some comparisons with Brown’s book will be made in passing. (See Brad Skow’s NDPR review of Brown, http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=6603.) Despite the topical overlap, US and Physical Relativity are very different works — different, but largely complementary.

DiSalle’s goals are very ambitious, and in broad terms they are threefold. He wants to (1) direct philosophers away from the canonical absolute/relational disputes, (2) reshape our understanding of the motivations, arguments, and achievements of the two giants of space-time physics (Newton and Einstein), and (3) refute, in passing, the Kuhnian view that the main paradigm changes in space-time physics are essentially arational and impossible to justify via non-circular arguments.

more from Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews here.

Daniele Castellani Perelli has a brief interview with Tahar Ben Jelloun in Reset DOC:

“We are all foreigners, and not only when we travel beyond national borders. Even a Sicilian in Milan is a foreigner. There is no such thing as an absolute foreigner” said Ben Jelloun, who has lived in Paris since 1971 and also writes for Le Monde and La Repubblica. “The concept of ‘being a foreigner’ moves with us”. In a recent interview, the author of Partir praised diversity (“There are over six billion of us in the world, and no two people are identical. This diversity is humankind’s wealth, it would be dreadful if we were all the same”), but with great intellectual honesty he also emphasised how hard it is not to be racists. “One cannot love everyone, but one can respect everyone without considering wealth or physical features”, he said, acknowledging how hard we all try at times not to generalise, “not to surrender to our lowest instincts”, and “not be racists”.

He admitted in fact that “morals and culture are not enough to avoid being racists; willpower is necessary too”. Cooperation from immigrants is however needed to avoid racism. “What would I say to my compatriots from Morocco who come to live in France? Respect the law, always remain within legality. When one is invited to someone’s home, one does not start by breaking all the plates. Pedagogic work is also needed to achieve integration. One must talk to immigrants and not just insult them.” On this subject, Ben Jelloun criticised the Berlusconi government’s immigration policies, and addressed words that were not at all evident but rather awkward ones on human rights issues.

Maya Jaggi in Bookforum:

The Indian Ocean, with its ancient patterns of trade and empire, has buoyed Amitav Ghosh’s writing for twenty years. The Shadow Lines (1988), his second novel, examines the partition of Bengal, while his anthropological travelogue In an Antique Land (1992) probes age-old ties between India and Egypt. The best-selling novel The Glass Palace (2000) is set between Burma and India circa the Second World War, and The Hungry Tide (2004) explores the mangrove forests and marginal peoples of the Sundarbans tidal plain. His sixth novel, the first in a projected trilogy, traces the global effects of a gargantuan drug-trafficking enterprise. While the slave trade in the Atlantic triangle between England, Africa, and the Americas has long been a rich source of epic fiction, Sea of Poppies casts light on a less well-charted triangular trade.

From the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth, British India led the world as an opium supplier, an export business imposed and monopolized by the East India Company expressly to balance the colonial power’s trade with China. Though Britons thirsted for tea, silk, and porcelain, China’s relative imperviousness to British manufactured goods meant that, without the addictive lure of opium, that demand would have drained the empire’s coffers. The novel unfolds on the eve of the Anglo-Chinese opium wars of 183943 and 1846–60, just as China’s mandarins are cracking down on the illegal import—having failed, as one bellicose British merchant sees it, to “understand the benefits of Free Trade.” As traffickers in Macao are publicly beheaded, and Lord Palmerston threatens to send a fleet to reopen Chinese markets by force, the price of opium plummets, sending a jolt up the supply chain, from British seamen to factory hands and poppy farmers in Bengal and Bihar.

Gian Lorenzo Bernini was said to have been only 8 when he carved a stone head that “was the marvel of everyone” who saw it, according to a contemporary biographer. He was not much older when he dazzled Pope Paul V, who reportedly declared, “We hope that this youth will become the Michelangelo of his century.” Prophetic words: over a long lifetime, Bernini undertook commissions for eight popes, transforming the look of 17th-century Rome as Michelangelo had helped shape Florence and Rome a century before. Much of the Baroque grandeur of the Eternal City—its churches, fountains, piazzas and monuments—can be credited to Bernini and his followers.

Yet, despite his artistic stature, Bernini is only now receiving his first major American exhibition—at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles (through October 26) and then at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa (November 28, 2008-March 8, 2009). One explanation for the oversight is obvious, says Catherine Hess, associate curator of sculpture and decorative arts at the Getty and a co-curator of the exhibition. “How do you move Piazza San Pietro?”

more from The Smithsonian here.

///
Look Not to Memories
Angela de Hoyos

wear your colors
like a present person
……………today is
……………here & now

let the innocent past
lie
in dignity:
……………broken wing
……………wilted lily
……………shroud

don’t look back
the goodbook
advises
……………lest you become
……………a pillar of salt

. . . and I’m a fool
for not discarding
……………my worn-out
……………bags of guilt
///

Michael Dirda in The Washington Post:

The Energies, Gists, and Spirits of Letters, Words, and Combinations Thereof; Their Roots, Bones, Innards, Piths, Pips, and Secret Parts, Tinctures, Tonics, and Essences; With Examples of Their Usage Foul and Savory

Take a look at Alphabet Juice. To all appearances, it might be just one more tributary to the never-ending stream of books about language and proper usage. Haven’t we already had our loosey-goosey grammar and diction excoriated by H.W. Fowler ( Modern English Usage), Theodore Bernstein ( The Careful Writer) and John Simon ( Paradigms Lost)? Haven’t scholars from W.W. Skeat and Eric Partridge to the latest editors of the Oxford English Dictionary unriddled the etymological mysteries behind our most common words? What makes this book by Roy Blount so special?

Well, Blount, of course. You don’t so much read Alphabet Juice as listen to it. The book may be printed, paginated and bound, but I’m guessing that some kind of microchip, probably embedded in the spine, funnels Blount’s ingratiating, slightly disingenuous voice directly into your brain. A given entry — “the f-word,” “subjunctive,” “menu-ese,” “pizzazz” — may start off with a scholarly account of a word or term’s origin, with more than a casual glance at its Proto-Indo-European root, but before long Blount will soft-shoe his way into an anecdote, some comic verse, a bit of wordplay. Look up the phrase “honest broker.” Here we learn that “the word broker stems from the Spanish alboroque, a ceremonial gift at the resolution of a business deal, which in turn is from the Arabic baraka, divine blessing. Barack Obama’s first name comes (by way of his father, same name) from that word.” All fascinating no doubt, but the true Blount wallop — from out of left field — comes in the next paragraph:

“I am told that today a Wall Streeter no longer uses broker as the verb form, but instead endeavors to broke a security. One reason I’m not rich is that I am broker-phobic. I assume they are always trying to unload dreck on people like me and lining up something underhandedly predetermined for insiders: if it ain’t fixed, don’t broke it.”

More here.