Spengler in the Asia Times:

Why do nations and peoples exist, and why do particular nations exist in particular forms? Under the principle of national self-determination, more sovereign nations raised their flags during the past century than at any time in history. Many of them will not survive the next century. The old national states defined by language and ethnicity are in steep decline. Each of the world’s three most populous countries, China, India, and the United States, defies conventional definition in its own way.

Cookie-cutter political science has failed ignominiously, for example, the American conceit that what works in Baltimore or Buffalo also should work in Basra or Beijing. Political science needs a new start, and that is what the distinguished philosopher Jean Bethke Elshtain offers in her latest book.

Our concept of the state, as well as the self, begins with our understanding of God, she contends. Absolutism and tyranny emulate a tyrannical God who rules by whim, subject to no law of nature save his own caprice. The constitutional state of self-imposed limits, by contrast, arose from the theology of love and reason taught by St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas. Others, notably Michael Novak, have made similar arguments, but Elsthain hacks much deeper at the root of the problem, namely the troubled notion of natural sovereignty. Her research surprises and disturbs, pointing to conclusions more radical than she is willing to draw.

Sovereignty, the one political idea the modern world takes for granted, was not the brainchild of the Enlightenment, but the conceptual bastard of medieval apologists for absolute papal power, Elsthain argues.

An interview with Gao Xingjian in the Guardian:

Aged 68, Gao lives in Paris’s 2nd arrondissement with Céline Yang, a novelist who left China after 1989. Gao, who also writes in French, has translated and directed plays in his adopted language, and was awarded the Légion d’honneur in 2000. He sees himself as a “fragile man who has managed not to be crushed by authority and to speak to the world in his own voice”. As he pointed out recently at Warwick University, on a rare visit to Britain, most of his life’s work has been done since leaving China. While the Swedish academy saw him as a “perspicacious sceptic” possessed of “bitter insights”, for Ma, Gao is a “tranquil yet engaged presence; a very composed, mild-mannered man, but a passionate reader and artist”. Speaking in French, smiling readily though he seems frail, Gao recalls the Nobel prize as a “whirlwind. I was carried away, and it was difficult to organise my life. Very soon after, I fell ill, and had two big heart operations one after the other. It was because of the fatigue and pressure. I became an ornament on the political scene.”

The official Chinese reaction to the Nobel was predictably hostile. The head of the Chinese Writers’ Association said the prize had been “used for political purposes and thus has lost its authority”. According to Ma, that body had “campaigned for years for the Nobel prize to be awarded to one of their state-sanctioned writers, so they were furious when it went to a political exile”. Yet Gao has also been attacked by dissidents – notably for his play Escape (1989), written within months of the Tiananmen Square massacre, and the ostensible trigger for all his work being banned in China. Its three characters take refuge from the army crackdown in a warehouse, amid sexual tensions and cynicism about self-proclaimed heroes. “Exiled writers said my play blackened the democracy movement,” Gao says. “Even today, those attacks continue.” In Ma’s view, “It was criticised by the pro-democracy activists because it failed to show the students in a heroic light.”

According to Gao, a writer’s only responsibility is “to the language he writes in”. Determined to rid himself of others’ ideologies, to live, as he says, “without isms”, he advocates a “cold literature”, detached from both political agendas and consumerist pressures, whose purpose is to bear witness.

///
Fast Food
Richard Thompson

Big mac, small mac, burger and fries

Shove ’em in boxes all the same size

Easy on the mustard, heavy on the sauce

Double for the fat boy, eats like a horse.
…………..

Fry them patties and send ’em right through

Microwave oven going to fry me too

Can’t lose my job by getting in a rage

Got to get my hands on that minimum wage.
…………..

Shove it in their faces, give ’em what they want

Got to make it fast, it’s a Fast Food Restaurant.
…………..

Shake’s full of plastic, meat’s full of worms

Everything’s zapped so you won’t get germs

Water down the ketchup, easier to pour on

Pictures on the register in case you’re a moron.
…………..

Keep your uniform clean, don’t talk back

Blood down your shirt going to get you the sack

Sugar, grease, fats and starches

Fine to dine at the golden arches.
…………..

Shove it in their faces, give ’em what they want

Got to make it fast, it’s a Fast Food Restaurant.
…………..

Baby thrown up, booth number 9

Wash it down, hose it down, happens all the time

Cigarettes in the coffee, contact lens in the tea

I’d rather feed pigs than humanity.
…………..

Shove it in their faces, give ’em what they want

Got to make it fast, it’s a Fast Food Restaurant.

///

From The City Journal:

The New York Times is determined to show that women are discriminated against in the sciences; too bad the facts say otherwise. A new study has “found that girls perform as well as boys on standardized math tests,” claims a July 25 article by Tamar Lewin—thus, the underrepresentation of women on science faculties must result from bias. Actually, the study, summarized in the July 25 issue of Science, shows something quite different: while boys’ and girls’ average scores are similar, boys outnumber girls among students in both the highest and the lowest score ranges. Either the Times is deliberately concealing the results of the study or its reporter cannot understand the most basic science reporting.

Science’s analysis of math test scores only confirms the hypothesis that cost Summers his Harvard post: that boys are found more often than girls at the outer reaches of the bell curve of abstract reasoning ability. If you’re hoping to land a job in Harvard’s math department, you’d better not show up with average math scores; in fact, you’d better present scores at the absolute top of the range. And as studies have shown for decades, there are many more boys than girls in that empyrean realm. Unless science and math faculties start practicing the most grotesque and counterproductive gender discrimination, a skew in the sex of their professors will be inevitable, given the distribution of top-level cognitive skills. Likewise, boys will be and are overrepresented among math dunces—though the feminists never complain about the male math failure rate.

Lewin claims that the “researchers looked at the average of the test scores of all students, the performance of the most gifted children and the ability to solve complex math problems. They found, in every category, that girls did as well as boys.” This statement is simply wrong. Among white 11th-graders, there were twice as many boys as girls above the 99th percentile—that is, at the very top of the curve. (Asians, however, showed a very slight skew toward females above the 99th percentile, while there were too few Hispanics and blacks scoring above even the 95th percentile to compute their gender ratios.)

More here.

From In Character:

Compassion today is widely regarded as a good, and those who display it as good people. Indeed, many see compassion or some related virtue (e.g., empathy) as the core of goodness, as the virtue of virtues. It’s not only a private but also a public virtue, much cherished in our politicians. Even in international affairs, of all places, the apex of virtuous action is widely taken to be “humanitarian intervention” or the use of force to relieve suffering. Compassion has not always enjoyed so lofty and uncontroversial a status; will it someday once again relinquish it?

That compassion is natural to human beings there is no question. But does it pertain to our higher or to our lower natures? As even or precisely those who take compassion for a virtue acknowledge, it is an emotion. Can an emotion be a virtue? Yes, if the keynote of virtue is naturalness in the sense of spontaneity or authenticity. No, if what defines virtue is the perfection of our nature through the triumph of reason over passion. For this reason the long history of thought about compassion (stretching back at least 2,500 years now) has revolved around just this issue.

More here.

You can download it here.

In another conversation with Paul Price, Craig Calhoun continues his analysis of supposedly irrational factors at play in electoral politics. This time they focus on charisma: to what extent is Barack Obama’s unique mix of political passion and a cool demeanor the source of his political appeal? Referring to Max Weber’s model of charismatic leadership, Calhoun notes that Obama has the gift of making us see him as someone who stands outside the traditional structures of government-and therefore someone who can help Americans break the “iron cage” of bureaucracy, politics-as-usual and dominant social roles.

Aryeh Neier in Project Syndicate:

It is only a little more than fifteen years ago that the first of the contemporary international courts was created to prosecute those who commit war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. That court, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, may soon mete out justice to a new defendant, following the arrest in Belgrade of Radovan Karadzic, wartime leader of Bosnia’s Serbs.

Yet there is already a persistent theme in criticism of such tribunals: in their effort to do justice, they are obstructing achievement of a more important goal, peace. Such complaints have been expressed most vociferously when sitting heads of state are accused of crimes. The charges filed by the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court against Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir for crimes against humanity and genocide in Darfur are the latest example. Indeed, the denunciations of the justice process this time are more intense and more vehement than in the past.

The complaints were also loud in 1995, when the ICTY’s prosecutor indicted Karadzic and his military chief, General Ratko Mladic, and even louder when they were indicted again later in the same year for the massacre at Srebrenica. The timing of that second indictment especially aroused critics, because it came just before the start of the Dayton peace conference. Because they faced arrest, Karadzic and Mladic did not go to Dayton.

But, as matters turned out, their absence did not hinder the parties from reaching an agreement. Indeed, it may have helped as the leaders of Bosnia, Croatia, and Yugoslavia negotiated an end to the war in Bosnia.

Phil Berardelli in ScienceNOW:

Cosmologists probably know more about the first few minutes after the big bang–thought to have occurred about 13.7 billion years ago–than they do about the following billion years of the universe’s existence, sometimes known as the cosmic dark ages. Within that interim, the first stars formed and began to light up the universe.

The problem with studying those very early stars is that they no longer exist. According to theory, all or nearly all of them began as supergiants hundreds of times more massive than the sun. Then they expended their nuclear fuel and exploded within a few million years. This early demise was good for the evolution of the universe, because the supergiants dispersed the heavy elements necessary to form smaller stars as well as planets and, eventually, people. But unfortunately for scientists, the primordial beasts also expunged all detectable evidence of themselves.

A team led by physicist Naoki Yoshida of Nagoya University in Japan set out to fill this cosmic evolutionary gap in the only way currently possible: They carried out a computer simulation that duplicates the process of star formation in the very young universe.

In Reset DOC:

You have often written wonderful words about European values. Does a European identity exist and what are the main European values?

Well, I actually think that one should not try to enumerate European values, because the European identity is an open one, it is changing, and because it can always include new ingredients as well. Nevertheless, the European identity is not something arbitrary. By this I mean that in Europe a specific status for differences has been created. This is really what characterizes Europe, compared to other major civilizations and groups such as China, the United States or even Russia, where there is always an attempt to unify even what is a very heterogeneous society within the same values and the same centralized organization. The specificity of Europe, and of the European Union in particular, is that it maintains the diversity of its members while providing them with a certain status, which means that first of all, there is of course an obligation of tolerance (we no longer wage wars against each other), but beyond that we elaborate our opinions by becoming capable of comparing and criticizing the opinions of our neighbours.

You don’t hear much about James Thurber (1894-1961) anymore, and it’s not just because the glory days of the New Yorker as a humor magazine are many decades in the past. His work is perennially in print, and his “Writings and Drawings” have merited a Library of America edition. But Thurber aficionados do not present a united front because usually people are devoted to a single aspect of Thurber’s comic genius: his dogs, noble animals carrying on with dignity in a world gone mad; the stories in his hilarious gem of a Midwestern memoir, “My Life and Hard Times”; his cartoon characters, brilliantly described by Neil Gaiman as “lumpy men and women who looked like they were made of cloth, all puzzled and henpecked and aggrieved.” We Thurberites would need a convention to honor all our different passions.

more from the LA Times here.

Ammon Shea, a sometime furniture mover, gondolier and word collector, has written an oddly inspiring book about reading the whole of the Oxford English Dictionary in one go. Shea’s book resurrects many lost, misshapen, beautifully unlucky words — words that spiraled out, like fast-decaying muons, after their tiny moment in the cloud chamber of English usage. There’s hypergelast (a person who won’t stop laughing), lant (to add urine to ale to give it more kick), obmutescence (willful speechlessness) and ploiter (to work to little purpose) — all good words to have on the tip of your tongue when, for example, you’re stopped for speeding.

Shea’s book offers more than exotic word lists, though. It also has a plot. “I feel as though I am eating the alphabet,” he writes halfway through, and you want him to make it to the end. This is the “Super Size Me” of lexicography.

more from the NY Times here.

///
“When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again.  After this, nothing happened.” –Alaxchiiaahush (Plenty Coups or Plenty Achievements), Chief of the Crow tribe, 1880

Herd of Buffalo Crossing the Missouri River on Ice
William Matthews

If dragonflies can mate atop the surface tension
of water, surely these tons of bison can mince
across the river, their fur peeling in strips like old

wallpaper, their huge eyes adjusting to how far
they can see when there’s no big or little bluestem,
no Indian grass nor prairie cord grass to plod through.

Maybe because it’s bright in the blown snow
and swirling grit, their vast heads are lowered
to the gray ice: nothing to eat, little to smell.

They have their own currents. You could watch a herd
of running pronghorn swerve like a river rounding
a meander and see better what I mean. But

bison are a deeper, deliberate water, and there will
never be enough water for any West but the one
into which we watch these bison carefully disappear.

//

Alfred Kazin in The Atlantic Monthly:

A Moveable Feast by Earnest Hemingway.

[Ed. note: This review was originally published in the Atlantic Monthly, June 1964.]

So much impulse to autobiography probably springs from some deeply uneasy sense of one’s self as detached from early kindred and natural ties. But to a writer like Hemingway the effect of such detachment is not to make oneself powerless, but, on the contrary, to be seized by the possibilities of a new subject — by the self as an aesthetic and dramatic unit whose moving, walking, eating, drinking, loving, fearing, and tasting become marvelously vivid material. People today are notoriously not more independent and self-directing than they used to be, but more personal, more concerned with the self, more solicitous of and interested in the self than people used to be. Romanticism, psychology, and middle-class solicitude for oneself have made up the background of our interest in Hemingway. And it is the intense, almost clinical accuracy with which Hemingway has been able to convey the self’s sensations, as if each were called up for some separate erogenous zone, that is behind the physical excitement with which one reads Hemingway even at his worst. Hemingway is the great modern poet of the self as all-sufficient subject. What the self thinks, wants, eats, drinks, loves, and hates, Hemingway had put into relief as sharp and beautiful as the head of a lady poised against far-off mountains and valleys in a painting of the Italian Renaissance. But to be this much concerned with the exact feel of pebbles in your boots and the shock with which your shoulder can receive the recoil of a gun, with the coldness of a martini glass in your hand and the brightness of the stars overhead as you make love, is to identify the strength of writing with the presentation of the self. So much emphasis on the self as artistic subject is to turn other people into irrelevancies and distractions.

More here.

From The New York Times:

She is neither a time traveler nor a superhero able to simultaneously inhabit several disparate corners of American literary history at once. Rather, Ms. Climent was showing off the large trompe-l’oeil mural she had painted for New York University’s Languages and Literature building at 19 University Place. The mural, “At Home With Their Books,” measures 10 feet high by 30 feet wide and depicts, in six chronologically ordered panels, the writing spaces of six authors who spent some, if not all, of their careers in New York. Ms. Climent said the university selected three of the authors and asked her to choose three, but stipulated that none could be living.

Edith Wharton (1862-1937)

Born into a wealthy New York family, Wharton spent a decade living in an estate known as the Mount in Lenox, Mass., that was extensively restored and for several years was open to the public as a sort of museum. “I was lucky that I got to go there and photograph it before it went broke and closed down,” Ms. Climent said. Pointing at the mural, she added: “Wharton wrote ‘The House of Mirth’ in that bedroom. But the fountain pen hadn’t been invented yet, so I put it on the shelf in front — because it came later in her career. I re-created her habit of throwing papers on the floor.”

More here.

As a response to Robin’s earlier Garfield post, I present Garfield translated into Chinese and then back:

More here.

Mattathias Schwartz in the NYT Magazine:

One afternoon in the spring of 2006, for reasons unknown to those who knew him, Mitchell Henderson, a seventh grader from Rochester, Minn., took a .22-caliber rifle down from a shelf in his parents’ bedroom closet and shot himself in the head. The next morning, Mitchell’s school assembled in the gym to begin mourning. His classmates created a virtual memorial on MySpace and garlanded it with remembrances. One wrote that Mitchell was “an hero to take that shot, to leave us all behind. God do we wish we could take it back. . . . ” Someone e-mailed a clipping of Mitchell’s newspaper obituary to MyDeathSpace.com, a Web site that links to the MySpace pages of the dead. From MyDeathSpace, Mitchell’s page came to the attention of an Internet message board known as /b/ and the “trolls,” as they have come to be called, who dwell there.

/b/ is the designated “random” board of 4chan.org, a group of message boards that draws more than 200 million page views a month. A post consists of an image and a few lines of text. Almost everyone posts as “anonymous.” In effect, this makes /b/ a panopticon in reverse — nobody can see anybody, and everybody can claim to speak from the center. The anonymous denizens of 4chan’s other boards — devoted to travel, fitness and several genres of pornography — refer to the /b/-dwellers as “/b/tards.”

Measured in terms of depravity, insularity and traffic-driven turnover, the culture of /b/ has little precedent. /b/ reads like the inside of a high-school bathroom stall, or an obscene telephone party line, or a blog with no posts and all comments filled with slang that you are too old to understand.

Ed Smith in The Liberal:

WHAT is the ultimate quality in a sportsman? Is it athleticism or       skill? Maybe it is courage, self-belief or the ability to seize the          moment? Perhaps there is something greater still that sets apart the very best: the ability to create the illusion of complicity. Great    players, at their peak, sometimes exert such a mastery over opponents that they appear complicit. They reduce usually aggressive competitors to seeming like mere accomplices; the great man is the puppet-master, the feisty opponent just a puppet. Simon Barnes, in his insightful new book The Meaning of Sport, calls this gift ‘Federer’, in honour of the elegant Swiss tennis genius.

For an intimate study of ‘Federer’ at work, watch the film Zidane – a 21st Century Portrait. I had approached the film with some trepidation as I didn’t expect to be much bothered about a real-time replay of the match between Real Madrid and Villarreal on 23rd April 2005.

How wrong I was. It is the best insight into the mind and movement of a great sportsman I have ever experienced in any medium. Seventeen synchronized cameras focused exclusively on Zidane throughout the match. The film, which follows the first kick to the last, takes us not only onto the pitch, but also into the imaginative world of a great player in the final chapter of his career.

Kamran Nazeer in Prospect:

Eva Hoffman’s memoir of migration, Lost in Translation, first published in 1989, begins aboard a ship leaving Poland 30 years earlier. “We can’t be leaving all this behind,” writes Hoffman in her dismay, “but we are.” Looking ahead, she describes “an erasure, of the imagination, as if a camera eye has snapped shut.” Her family is moving to Canada, a place of which Hoffman knows nothing more than “vague outlines, a sense of vast spaces and little habitation.”

By contrast, Isabel, the protagonist of Hoffman’s new novel, Illuminations, is heavily laden with the culture of other places. On arriving in Budapest, Isabel, a concert pianist and an Argentinian by birth, “walks along the grand avenues and the ordinary streets.” It is her first visit, “yet the city corresponds to something she recognises.” In many of the cities that she visits, Isabel has friends, access to cliques and exclusive knowledge. She is an excellent nomad, unlike the young Eva, who is baffled by the place where she arrives. On seeing her first suburban house, Eva observes: “This one-storey structure surrounded by a large garden… doesn’t belong in a city—but neither can it be imagined in the country.”

Between these two books lies almost 50 years of migration and technological change.

From the site:

Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life? Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness in a quiet American suburb.

[H/t: Michelle Galiounghi]