I.

When I fall asleep in a coffin posture, supine, with my feet tenting beneath the covers and my nose tracing a line up toward the wobbling ceiling fan, I frequently wake up a committed if unwilling Cartesian.

Like anyone else in R.E.M. sleep, as soon I slip under my brain starts sending hormonal relaxants to my muscles that anesthetize and effectively paralyze them. Problem is, when I wake up from R.E.M. only a fraction of me pops awake sometimes. It’s not a split between the left and right sides of my body, like a stroke patient, nor a top-bottom paraplegic split. And it’s nothing like a foot or hand falling asleep, then dethawing with that achy tingle. Mine is an old-fashioned, cogito-ergo mind-body bifurcation. Mentally, “I” pop right awake, and as a natural course of being awake this “I” sends signals for my legs and arms and mouth and eyes to yawn, or stretch, or see what time it is and whether I have to go to the bathroom. Those signals echo, ignored. My mind casts the spell again, but it turns out I cannot twiddle a toe or even flex a nostril, no matter how much I strain. Within seconds of the failure, I’m agonizingly aware of the discrepancy. It’s not a dream (there’s nothing fantastical happening), more like a huge karmic blunder, what being reincarnated as a park statue would feel like.

This rigor mortis is actually easy to shrug off, as long as—and here’s the philosophically troubling bit—the outside world intervenes. I can still sense my environment, like some sort of amoeba or slug—that’s a passive act—but the universe must change somehow. I’m powerless to effect change myself and will remain locked up, alone. A sudden alarm clock will unchain me, but not any noises that were already mewing when I “woke” up. A dramatic unmasking of a window might do it, but not the slow creep of the sun. The slightest nudge from my girlfriend will budge me (I suppose it’s the opposite of those little jerks she makes whenever she falls asleep), but the heat of an arm already draped across me is useless.

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Paul Krugman in the NYT Book Review:

Last October, Alan Greenspan — who had spent years assuring investors that all was well with the American financial system — declared himself to be in a state of “shocked disbelief.” After all, the best and brightest had assured him our financial system was sound: “In recent decades, a vast risk management and pricing system has evolved, combining the best insights of mathematicians and finance experts supported by major advances in computer and communications technology. . . . The whole intellectual edifice, however, collapsed in the summer of last year.”

Justin Fox’s “Myth of the Rational Market” brilliantly tells the story of how that edifice was built — and why so few were willing to acknowledge that it was a house built on sand.

Do we really need yet another book about the financial crisis? Yes, we do — because this one is different. Instead of focusing on the errors and abuses of the bankers, Fox, the business and economics columnist for Time magazine, tells the story of the professors who enabled those abuses under the banner of the financial theory known as the efficient-market hypothesis. Fox’s book is not an idle exercise in intellectual history, which makes it a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the mess we’re in. Wall Street bought the ideas of the efficient-market theorists, in many cases literally: professors were lavishly paid to design complex financial strategies. And these strategies played a crucial role in the catastrophe that has now overtaken the world economy.

This journey to disaster began with a beautiful idea.

Germaine Greer in the Guardian:

At Camp Quest, the five-day “atheist summer camp” for children that ended on Friday, campers were challenged to prove that unicorns do not exist. It is to be hoped that the children did not spend too much time on a logical impossibility. It is much easier to prove that God cannot exist because He is a contradiction in terms. However, both God and the unicorn exist as ideas, and ideas, whether muddled or not, are real. The imagination of a child who was utterly unfamiliar with either God or the unicorn would be cruelly impoverished.

A clever child might argue that the unicorn could exist because it is no more absurd than the narwhal whale. The twisted tusk of the narwhal is what was supposed to grow from the head of the horse known as the unicorn. The centrepiece of a 15th-century Flemish mille-fleurs tapestry in the Victoria and Albert Museum is a unicorn, with a horn exactly like that: a narwhal tusk projects from its forehead, and a heavy tail with flukes, like a whale’s, flourishes above its back. The background is studded with symmetrically placed flowering plants, plus the odd exotic game bird. I would give much to know what the tapestried picture means. Are all the featured creatures imaginary? Is the invented world of human fantasy here presented as superior to reality? Without knowing more about the idea of the unicorn, there is no way I can know what I am looking at.

Paul La Farge in Bookforum:

What seemed like tragedy in The Crying of Lot 49 returns here as farce, and there’s something tragic about the transformation. You could say Pynchon is losing his edge, that his paranoid sensibility is not so keen at seventy-two (his present age) as it was in 1969, when he was only thirty-two, living in the LA area, and working on his magnum opus, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). You could even suspect him of nostalgia. But the other possibility—with Pynchon, there’s always another possibility—is that he has written a book about losing it, about memory and, more to the point, forgetting. Beneath Inherent Vice’s riffs and twists and red (or are they green?) herrings, there’s a deep sadness, a despair of ever making anything out clearly. Here’s Sportello looking at some photographs:

“Doc got out his lens and gazed into each image till one by one they began to float apart into little blobs of color. It was as if whatever had happened had reached some kind of limit. It was like finding the gateway to the past unguarded, unforbidden because it didn’t have to be. Built into the act of return finally was this glittering mosaic of doubt. Something like what Sauncho’s colleagues in marine insurance liked to call inherent vice.”

If there’s a secret shimmering in the novel’s fog, it’s that the limit of what can be known is imposed not by any nefarious organization, but by memory itself.

Ex-Pedophile Shares Tips On How To Make Your Kids Less Attractive

The Right Words

After months in the far north
they return, like snow buntings,
in a blizzard of wings. I did not
think they could thrive in icy climes
but here they are, searching the wrackline
for drifted seed. When they turned pale,
fell between a rock

and a barren place, they lay
deep in a corrie in a nest lined
with sheep’s wool, fur
from a mountain hare.
And down from a ptarmigan
conferring resilience
its chameleon gift.

by Kathryn Daszkiewicz

From Lensculture:

David Lynch is endlessly creative, and his artistic output is usually quite bizarre and surreal. Lynch's latest project is as a photographer and collaborator with musician, artist and producer Danger Mouse. Together, they've created a multimedia installation that is now on display in Los Angeles.

Fifty of Lynch’s photographs are mounted on aluminum panels that seem to float on the gallery walls, converging with the moody rhythms of the music from Danger Mouse's latest album, Dark Night of the Soul.

The collaboration began when Danger Mouse, who has been a fan of Lynch’s for many years, approached the filmmaker about a possible project. The artists worked together and were inspired by each other— Lynch making photographs influenced by the original songs that Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse were creating.

More here.

From The City Journal:

In the summer of 2008, wheat and corn prices shot up across the globe. Pundits provided seemingly convincing explanations: grain was becoming scarce and thus more expensive because mainland Chinese were changing their eating habits and needed lots of it to feed their cattle—or perhaps because fear of oil shortages, combined with ecological fads, was leading consumers to adopt corn-based ethanol. Yet one year later, the Chinese are eating basically the same food as last year (feeding habits change very slowly), ethanol production is more or less at the same level, but the price of grain and corn on the Chicago market is back down again. How to explain the volatility of prices when production levels remain essentially the same?

The reason: grain or corn prices may at any point in time be driven more by speculation than by actual harvests. The rule applies to all transactions on financial markets, including oil, stocks, and derivatives. This is one of many examples that Rama Cont offers to describe how the real economy and the financial markets follow different rationales. In the short term—which can mean several years, in practice—the connection can be tenuous at best and difficult to model. If the connection were closer, Cont would know: he is at the forefront of the new science of financial modeling.

More here.

John Allen Paulos in his Who's Counting column at ABC News:

When a modern Western country whose economy is based on science and technology adopts an absurdly medieval law, one would think that this would be a news story of at least moderate size.

Oddly though, almost no attention has been paid in the United Stares to the passing last month of a bill establishing a crime of blasphemy in Ireland.

Approved by the Irish parliament, it states: “A person who publishes or utters blasphemous matter shall be guilty of an offence and shall be liable upon conviction on indictment to a fine not exceeding 25,000 euro.”

Furthermore, “a person publishes or utters blasphemous matter if (a) he or she publishes or utters matter that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters held sacred by any religion, thereby causing outrage among a substantial number of the adherents of that religion, and (b) he or she intends, by the publication or utterance of the matter concerned, to cause such outrage.”

Even if I weren't the author of a book entitled “Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don't Add Up,” I would find this bill abysmally wrong-headed.

More here.

The first rule of Breakfast Club is that you totally talk about Breakfast Club. And then you shout some about Breakfast Club, and do some truly awful dancing about Breakfast Club, and then you cry. But mostly you talk. In 1985, when The Breakfast Club was originally released, this was a fairly radical notion. Throughout the early 1980s, in movies like Porky’s, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and dozens of similar knock-offs, Hollywood depicted teens as raging hedonists devoted to the pleasures of the body. They practiced oral sex on carrots, they hired hookers, they got stoned before class, they drank themselves into happy oblivion. Even in John Hughes’ sweet-as-frosting Sixteen Candles, debauchery hovers in the margins. In The Breakfast Club, however, he broke completely with contemporary standards. Sure, there’s a scene where everyone gets stoned, and a couple of chaste kisses at the end, but the pursuit of pleasure is no longer the narrative engine driving this movie. Nor is romance, nor even the desire to assume grown-up responsibilities. Generous humanist that he was, Hughes was that rare adult who took teenagers just as seriously as they take themselves, and the result was a movie in which the five main characters – the brain, the jock, the princess, the criminal, and the basket case — pursue nothing more compelling than self-awareness and the public revelation of thoughts and feelings once consigned to diaries and psychologist offices.

more from The Smart Set writers (including myself) here.

“My country is my family,” writes Ricky Rice as he concludes his apologia pro vita sua — a.k.a Victor LaValle’s massive, heroically strange new novel, “Big Machine” (Spiegel & Grau: 378 pp., $25). “I like America.” There’s something both dissonant and grin-tuggingly candid in his plainspoken admission. Ricky, after all, is an ex-(more or less) heroin addict; a onetime cash mule; an itinerant janitor who’s cleaned the toilets in several of upstate New York’s less-than-glamorous train stations; a now-chaste former serial impregnator of women; and one of the few child escapees of the charismatic religious cult led by three (weird) sisters called the Washerwomen. Not to mention all the bizarreness and violence that pack these pages. Yet, even as we’d half-expect any patriotic sentiment of his to be along the lines of, say, Allen Ginsberg’s “America” — “America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing” — his proclamation seems just right. That “like” is perfect — a modest verb in place of the chest-thumping “love.” For a book with a dazzling array of flashy moving parts — secret societies, backstories toggled for maximum effect, angels and demons, suicide squads recruited from among the homeless — the language is more effective for being low key.

more from Ed Park at the LA Times here.

If not for Mad magazine, there might never have been (in no particular order) 1960s youth culture, underground comics, Wacky Packs, “Laugh-In,” “Saturday Night Live,” R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman or an age of irony, period. Mad, which began in 1952 as a comic book that parodied “serious” comics as well as American popular culture, with an emphasis on television, movies and advertising, was conceived and originally edited by Harvey Kurtzman (1924-93), a Brooklyn-born comic-strip artist, writer and editor. Kurtzman was the spiritual father of postwar American satire and the godfather of late-20th-century alternative humor. If this seems like hyperbole, all you have to do is read The Art of Harvey Kurtzman: The Mad Genius of Comics (Abrams Comic­Arts, $40), Denis Kitchen and Paul Buhle’s insightful, entertaining and profusely illustrated (with rare images of original work) biographical monograph, which chronicles almost everything Kurtzman accomplished — and that was quite a lot.

more from Steven Heller at the NY Times here.

In Endcliffe Park

A speck of dust no weightier than a thought
must have touched dead water.
I did not see what started it, but watch the ring
expand as though the pool is shaping O!
while I stand with the same exclamation
widening through me —

Could the Porter Brook, this autumn park,
the fallen and the falling leaves,
this calm pool and the weir beyond, the onrush
to Stinky Bob steaming on his bench in the sun,
all the snags and graces with which things go downhill,
be best regarded not as material
but one long, complex thought of Autumn
on this sector of the planet in its circuit round the sun,
a beat in that catchy theme
The Way Things Are?

And, more usefully, as I watch that circle spread
and these words begin enlarging on a momentary calm,
might we consider what arises in our minds
as nothing other than water, sky, trees, seasons,
and we who see ourselves as moving through the world
are better seen as receptacles, hosts
of the being that moves through us,
the pool in which its dust is registered and spread?

by Andrew Grieg

from This Life, This Life; Bloodaxe Books,
Northumberland, 2006

From Scientific American:

For centuries, Shakespeare skeptics have doubted the authorship of the Stratfordian Bard's literary corpus, proffering no fewer than 50 alternative candidates, including Francis Bacon, Queen Elizabeth I, Christopher Marlowe and the leading contender among the “anti-Stratfordians,” Edward de Vere, 17th earl of Oxford. And for nearly as long, the Shakespeare skeptics have toiled in relative obscurity, holding conferences in tiny gatherings and dreaming of the day their campaign would make front-page news. On April 18, 2009, the Wall Street Journal granted their wish with a feature story on how U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens came to believe (and throw his judicial weight behind) the skeptics.

Stevens's argument retreads a well-worn syllogism: Shakespeare's plays are so culturally rich that they could only have been written by a noble or scholar of great learning. The historical William Shakespeare was a commoner with no more than a grammar school education. Ergo, Shakespeare could not have written Shakespeare. For example, Stevens asks, “Where are the books? You can't be a scholar of that depth and not have any books in your home. He never had any correspondence with his contemporaries, he never was shown to be present at any major event—the coronation of James or any of that stuff. I think the evidence that he was not the author is beyond a reasonable doubt.”

More here.

From The New York Times:

It is hard to believe today that there was a time when securing Pelican Island, Yosemite and the Grand Canyon were controversial decisions denounced as a federal land grab inimical to states’ rights and economic growth. Of course every generation has its own idea of progress, beauty and necessity. What made Theodore Roosevelt a conservationist hero was his conviction that pelicans, 2,000-year-old redwood trees and ancient rock formations belonged to future generations of Americans as well as to the past. Weighed against eternity, what were the arguments of mining magnates, plume hunters, local businesses and assorted congressmen? From the time he became president, in 1901, until he left office 100 years ago, Roosevelt saved over 234 million acres of wild America.

How a city-born child of privilege became one of the greatest forces in American conservation is the subject of Douglas Brinkley’s vast, inspiring and enormously entertaining book, “The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America.” The subtitle is telling — the crusade for America, not “wild America” — because for Roosevelt, living forests and petrified forests, bird preserves and buffalo ranges were essential for the country’s survival as a moral and military power.

More here.

Carl Zimmer at Yale: Environment 360:

In 1997, Arthur Weis found himself with an extra bucket of seeds. Weis, who was teaching at the University of California at Irvine at the time, had dispatched a student, Sheina Sim, to gather some field mustard seeds for a study. When Sim was done with her research, Weis was left with a lot of leftover seeds. For no particular reason, he decided not to throw the bucket out. “We just tossed it in a cold, dry incubator,” said Weis.

Weis is glad they did. When a severe drought struck southern California, Weis realized that he could use the extra bucket of seeds for an experiment. In 2004 he and his colleagues collected more field mustard seeds from the same sites that Sim had visited seven years earlier. They thawed out some of the 1997 seeds and then reared both sets of plants under identical conditions. The newer plants grew to smaller sizes, produced fewer flowers, and, most dramatically, produced those flowers eight days earlier in the spring. The changing climate had, in other words, driven the field mustard plants to evolve over just a few years. “It was serendipity that we had the seeds lying around,” says Weis.

Weis is convinced that his experiment is just a harbinger of things to come. Global warming is projected to drastically raise the average global temperature, as well as producing many other changes to the world’s climate, such as more droughts in California. And in response, Weis and other researchers contend, life will undergo an evolutionary explosion.

“Darwin thought evolution was gradual, and that it would take longer than the lifetime of a scientist to observe even the slightest change,” says Weis, who is now at the University of Toronto. “That might be the average case, but evolution can also be very rapid under the right conditions. Climate change is going to be one of those things where the conditions are met.”

Over at Snag Films:

Second Skin takes an intimate look at three sets of computer gamers whose lives have been transformed by online virtual worlds. An emerging genre of computer software called Massively Multiplayer Online games, or MMOs, allows millions of users to interact simultaneously in virtual spaces. Of the 50 million players worldwide, 50 percent consider themselves addicted. From individuals struggling with addiction to couples who have fallen in love without meeting; from disabled players whose lives have been given new purpose to gold farmers, entrepreneurs and widows, Second Skin opens viewers’ eyes to a phenomenon that may permanently change the way human beings interact.