In 1977, the long-unknown, just-published Hungarian novelist Imre Kertész released a slim double volume, containing the novellas “Detective Story” and “The Pathseeker,” a translation of which has just been published in its own volume (Melville House, 126 pages, $13). Mr. Kertész would go on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002, in large part for his trilogy of “Fatelessness,” “The Failure,” and “Kaddish for a Child Unborn.” For an artist by his own admission incapable of thinking or writing about anything except Auschwitz, these two early works seem anomalous. “Detective Story” recounts insidious political brutality in an unnamed Latin American country, while “The Pathseeker” tells of a frustrated journey toward a hidden goal in an anonymous landscape (albeit one recognizable as somewhere in Central Europe). Slender though it is, “The Pathseeker” is a necessary addition to Mr. Kertész’s work in English, and should occasion thanks to both the novelist and his translator, Tim Wilkinson, who has rendered Mr. Kertész’s (famously difficult) Hungarian into a flowing, able English — as well as to Melville House’s fascinating “The Contemporary Art of the Novella” series, which rubric “The Pathseeker” falls under.

more from the NY Sun here.

Loury and McWhorter have a smart discussion on Obama, Clinton, “bittergate”, and the last debate.  Loury makes a  good, if not fully convincing, case for Hillary Clinton:

One may make a distinction between two types of novel: the self-enclosed and the open. The distinction is not absolute. Such things never are. Genre fiction may merge with what is called the literary novel, for instance. Still the categories I have in mind are useful, or at least interesting. By the self-enclosed novel, I mean one which makes no reference — or almost no reference — to anything beyond itself. It belongs to its age of course, but it does not appear to be set in time. Time naturally passes, as it must in a narrative, but there is no suggestion that events in the world of fact beyond the novel might impinge on its characters, influence their behaviour, or affect the course of their lives. The doors of the novel are closed against the winds of the world.

In the open novel, these winds, which are the winds of history, beat upon the characters. Indeed history is itself a character in this kind of novel, even if the author chooses not to introduce real-life historical figures.

more from The Spectator here.

The new issue of frieze is devoted to the question of reality in the age of aesthetics.  Mark Nash on the topic:

Much has been written, some of it by me, on the ‘documentary turn’ in contemporary art. We can trace this development back both to major international exhibitions such as documenta 11 in 2002 (of which I was a co-curator) and to exhibitions focusing more specifically on artists’ work with moving images, such as ‘Experiments with Truth’, which I curated at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia in 2004–5. Exhibitions such as these sought, among other things, to explore a range of artistic practices that, in one way or another, attempted a connection with social and political reality. Current shows such as ‘Come and Go: Fiction and Reality’ at the Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, and ‘The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality, and the Moving Image, Part 1: Dreams; Part 2: Realisms’, at the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C., are evidence of the continuing resonance of these issues.

This issue of frieze seeks to explore artists’ increasing involvement with documentary by invoking the notion of artistic agency as one in which the artist, in one way or another, crosses back and forth between the domains of reality and fiction. Rather than being faced with a choice, the artist solves the problem of this relationship through his or her activity of ‘border crossing’. ‘What does it mean’, asked the editors in their brief to me for this piece, ‘when an artist creates a scenario that partly relies on existing social realities, or when they actively enter that social reality to generate work?’

The name René Descartes will forever be entwined with our hopes and fears about the technological project. While it was Francis Bacon who originated the idea of conquering nature for the sake of relieving man’s estate, it was Descartes who told us we might truly become “like masters and possessors of nature”; Descartes who gave us the mathematical physics that has proven to be the indispensable instrument of modern science; and Descartes who foresaw that the ultimate instrument of the Baconian project would have to be medicine, since health is the primary good of life and the foundation of all other goods. The technological project was from the start biotechnological—in intent if not in realized practice—and it is hard not to think of today’s “transhumanists” when we read Descartes’ quasi-promise that technology might spare us even the “enfeeblement of old age.”

But the mastery and possession of nature is not the only, perhaps not even the deepest, theme of Descartes’ thought. We find in Descartes, and especially in his epoch-making Discourse on Method, a reflectiveness about what it means to be human and about the political conditions of his own activity that far outstrips the reflections we find in the contemporary heirs of his rhetoric, or indeed even what Descartes claims to learn from his own science. No mere scientist could have written the Discourse on Method or could help us understand the full depth of its complex message—and particularly its political and social message.

more from The New Atlantis here.

Speaking of languages, Steve Chawkins in the LA Times:

At a lavish event in the Chumash casino’s concert hall Friday night, most of the tribe’s 150 enrolled members lined up for copies of the long-awaited 608-page book [the first Samala dictionary].

“This is awesome,” said Nakia Zavalla, the 33-year-old cultural director for the Santa Ynez band of the Chumash, handling the volume as gingerly as a sacred text. “We won’t have to constantly go searching for our culture — now it’s right here.”

The dictionary’s 4,000 entries sound as foreign to most of the tribe members as they were familiar to their ancestors. It’s a tough language for English speakers, filled with sharp interruptions called glottal stops. Some words don’t quite roll off the tongue — qalpsik is to braid the hair tight — and more than 100 prefixes can dramatically change the meaning of verbs.

“There are so many rules,” moaned Zavalla. “Just a glottal stop — it sounds like uh-oh — can change the meaning of ma from ‘the’ to ‘rabbit.’

The last Chumash fluent in the language died in 1965. For years, speaking Samala carried a stigma, even on the reservation. At the American Indian boarding schools attended by students in past generations, use of native tongues was a punishable offense, a serious violation in an environment that aimed to minimize the value of being Indian.

More recently, some parents saw the language as a needless burden for their children — a reminder of an identity it sometimes seemed better to hide.

Mark Liberman has a couple of fascinating recent posts on comparing the vocabulary and on comparing the efficiency of different languages, over at Language Log:

Alex Baumans described a bilingual magazine’s problems in equalizing space and word-count allocations between Dutch and French…Alex’s discussion of Dutch compounds underlines a point that I made in the earlier post, namely that spaces are not a very helpful way to define the boundaries of words, especially in comparisons across languages. But what I’d like to follow up on today is his observation about comparisons of word and character counts.

As discussed in a post a few years ago (“One world, how many bytes?”, 8/5/2005), based on a variety of large collections of English-Chinese parallel texts, English texts are larger than their Chinese counterparts by a factor of between 1.37 and 2.27 before compression, or 1.19 to 1.41 after compression.

My impression is that there are several different factors at work here — but they don’t seem to me to account fully for the differences in length, especially in comparing compressed texts.

”’

“Wait a minute. What did you just say? You’re predicting $4-a-gallon gas?
… That’s interesting. I hadn’t heard that.”
–the President of the United States, Washington, D.C., Feb. 28, 2008

…

After Su Tung P’o
Heather McHugh

On The Birth of a Son

When a child is born, the parents say

they hope it’s healthy and intelligent. But as for me—

..

well, vigor and intelligence have wrecked my life. I pray

this baby we are seeing walloped, wiped and winningly anointed,

..

turns out dumb as oakum—and more sinister.

That way he can crown a tranquil life by being appointed

a cabinet minister.

…

From The London Times:

The toupee is gone. So, too, are four wives and most of his nine lives, along with the screen legends who conspired with Tony Curtis to make perhaps the most brilliant comedy film ever. At 82, the only surviving star of Some Like It Hot is still defiantly rattling his wheelchair and spilling salacious details about Hollywood’s golden era. Curtis, in London last week to launch an exhibition of his oil paintings at Harrods, the department store, talked about his fight with drugs and his passionate affair with Marilyn Monroe years before they were cast in the Billy Wilder comedy that would make them both cinema immortals.

The picture that emerges is of a man tormented throughout his career – by taunts about his pretty-boy looks, by Hollywood’s reluctance to recognise his achievements, by his failed relationships, fading allure and the years lost to cocaine. From the outset he felt he was destined for greatness – “From the way people looked at me, I knew it” – but a US Navy veterans’ website reveals that it could have been an altogether different destiny for the man born Bernard Schwartz.

In 1943 Signalman 3rd class Schwartz, the son of poor Hungarian Jewish immigrants, began the happiest period of his life serving aboard the USS Proteus. He was fascinated by submarines, thanks in part to watching Cary Grant peer through a periscope in Destination Tokyo. As a youngster he built boats out of broom handles, powered by tin propellers and elastic bands, which he launched on a park pond in east Manhattan.

More here.

Tim Adams in The Guardian:

The overriding argument of The Enchantress of Florence is partly that Western civilisation, to borrow from Gandhi, would be a good idea. Superstition and despotism are not the preserve of the mystical East here, nor are enlightenment and humanism inventions of the classical West. Each civilisation has its fair share of beauty and folly, cruelty and benevolence. ‘This may be the curse of the human race,’ the traveller suggests at one point, ‘not that we are so different from one another, but that we are so alike.’

In setting this out, Rushdie the jackdaw is much in evidence too: he borrows and moulds all sorts of familiar tales into this one; the Arabian nights have long since been fair game, but he also steals gleefully from Orlando Furioso and from Machiavelli. The novel offers something of a paper trail of such references in a long bibliography, mostly of scholarly histories: ‘A few liberties have been taken with the historical record in the interests of truth,’ Rushdie notes, in a wry statement of intent.

Namechecked in these notes is the writer that Rushdie has most often claimed as a touchstone, Italo Calvino. In his recent collection of essays, Step Across This Line, Rushdie noted that he wanted his later writing to aspire to Calvino’s stated virtues of ‘lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility and multiplicity’. He suggested that he was searching for something like the Italian’s tone of voice, which ‘used the language of fable while eschewing the easy moral purpose of, for example, Aesop’. Calvino might be mentioned in the compendious endnotes, but oddly not for the book this one most resembles, Invisible Cities, which played out exactly Rushdie’s storytelling scenario, though between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan.

More here.

Andrew Newberg in The Global Spiral:

For years, Eugene [D’Aquili] and I have been studying the relationship between religious experience and brain function, and we hope that by monitoring Robert’s brain activity at the most intense and mystical moments of his meditation, we might shed some light on the mysterious connection between human consciousness and the persistent and peculiarly human longing to connect with something larger than ourselves…..

As my first installment on Metanexus regarding our recent book entitled, Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief, there are several primary points that require mention. Why God Won’t Go Away is the culmination of almost 25 years of research into the relationship between the brain and religious experience. It strikes at the heart of questions such as: What makes something spiritual? Why are religious experiences so powerful? and What can religious and mystical experiences tell us about the mind and even about reality? Dr. Eugene d’Aquili initiated this groundbreaking research almost 25 years ago with an analysis of religious experience in ancient cultures. As human beings and human culture developed, so did religions and associated religious experiences. Today, there is a tremendous amount of information about the myriad varieties of religious experience. We also have a much greater understanding about how the brain and mind work. Why God Won’t Go Away utilizes this knowledge to forge an integrated approach to understanding religious and mystical experiences. It describes this research in terms that are understandable to the scientist and non-scientist. The overall goal of this book is to help to facilitate a dialogue regarding this nexus of science and spirituality and to allow everyone to feel comfortable addressing these issues regardless of their perspective. We also realize that science is limited in what it can tell us about these experiences. Thus, we will explore not only how science can inform us about religious experience, but can also examine the implications that such experiences have with regard to science.

My favorite Willie Nelson story is of the young harmonica player who wanted to be in Nelson’s band so much that he’d drive to shows just for the chance to sit in on stage.

Nelson liked the guy’s soulful sound and figured the leader of their struggling group had hired the harmonica player. After a few nights, he asked what the harp player was being paid. When the bandleader said, “Nothing,” Nelson declared, “Double his salary!”

The musician was Mickey Raphael, who’s been at Nelson’s side for nearly 35 years, as much a fixture in their live show as the Texas flag that unfurls each night — and the story tells a lot about the good-natured, carefree approach that has helped make the singer-songwriter a widely beloved figure. He turns 75 on April 29.

more from the LA Times here.

The best new airports in the world right now are in Beijing, where Norman Foster’s Terminal 3 has just opened, and on the outskirts of Madrid, where Terminal 4 at Barajas, designed by Richard Rogers Partnership, has been in operation since 2006. Foster has achieved what no other architect has been able to: he has rethought the airport from scratch and made it work. Foster has done for airports what the architects Reed & Stem did for train stations with their design for Grand Central, a building whose greatest achievement is not its sumptuous main concourse but its orchestration of an intricate web of people, trains, taxis, and passing automobiles into a system that feels straightforward and logical, as if the building itself were guiding you from the entrance to your train. Foster, likewise, has established a pattern so clear that your natural instinct to walk straight ahead from the front door takes you where you need to go. The sheer legibility of the place would be achievement enough, given its size. Foster’s office claims it is the largest building in the world: it has a hundred and twenty-six aircraft stands, and it had to include separate sections, with their own security stations and travel-document-control areas, for domestic and international travel; a train station for a new rapid-transit line to downtown Beijing; an array of luxury shops; and even a Burger King. Even more remarkable than this organizational feat, however, is the fact that Terminal 3 is also an aesthetically exhilarating place to be.

more from The New Yorker here.

No figure looms so large in American poetry over the past 50 years as John Ashbery. Yet he has never been easy to place. Each of his first 12 books, from “Some Trees” in 1956 to “A Wave” in 1984, was in some way different from what other poets were doing and from whatever Ashbery himself had just done. Critics celebrated him. But they all celebrated a different poet. Was he a romantic in the tradition of John Keats and Wallace Stevens, or an experimentalist like Gertrude Stein? A distinctively gay poet, or a writer who avoids autobiographical reference? A connoisseur of moods, or an abstract thinker concerned with identity and the nature of art?

more from the NY Times here.

///
Rice
Reetika Vazirani

And this is hunger:
     beans & rice
     beans & rice.

A pang for a meal. You’re broke.
Sweet butter on challah. In the eighties,
you had money, everybody did
until the stock market crash
when the lucky got richer.
Spiced chicken on flat wheat,
the chef at Kebabish
cooking for you. An immigrant with no papers
cooking just for you.
The drizzle & snap of oil on fire,
cumin bursting into pelao, biryani.

You rave, a deported illegal
wandering into the night air
sniffing the streets for gravy.
You are nearly crazy with the hint of it.
Keep walking.

It is Main Street & you’re a citizen.
Remember the ceremony
& all the coca-cola & hot dogs afterwards?
Or try to imagine your old life.
Being a saleslady in Virginia
is far preferable
to the old way of life
that you lived when you were a queen
called Rani in your native country & the servants
fanned you night & day when you
snapped your fingers.

///

From The New York Times:

REAPPRAISALS: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century By Tony Judt.

Without going back as far as Herodotus (who gave us the word “history” from the Greek for “enquiry”), and leaving aside Caesar and Churchill, who first made history and then wrote it, or Gibbon and Macaulay, who both sat as members of Parliament, the “engaged historian” belongs to a long and often honorable tradition. It was on display 20 years ago when The New York Times carried a full-page advertisement rebuking President Reagan, “A Reaffirmation of Principle,” signed by 63 public intellectuals (for want of a less irritating name) who included such eminent historians as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Fritz Stern.

That ad is mentioned by Tony Judt in “Reappraisals,” his exhilarating new collection of essays, by way of another rebuke, this time to liberals who “acquiesced in President Bush’s catastrophic foreign policy,” but then he is himself one of the latest adornments of that engaged tradition. A Londoner by origin and a New Yorker by adoption, Judt was educated at Cambridge, and is now a professor at New York University and director of its Remarque Institute. N.Y.U. is no ivory tower, as it turns out: in a memorable article not included here, he described looking downtown from his office window on 9/11, to see the 21st century begin.

More here.

From Harvard Magazine:

The scenes are familiar from biology textbooks. A long string of DNA is copied to form a matching strand. A virus infects a cell by stealing through its membrane. Two white blood cells meet and confer before launching an immune attack. In textbooks, all these processes that are so fundamental to the lives of cells are typically depicted in drawings or static snapshots captured by powerful electron microscopes. But that’s changing. A growing revolution in imaging is making it possible for biologists to watch small-scale events as they unfold in living cells and tissues.

“The human brain is vision-focused,” says professor of molecular and cellular biology Jeff Lichtman. “If we see things, then we think we know what they mean.” To be able finally to see events that were known only in theory is incredibly satisfying for scientists. Even more important, this revolution also opens up the possibility of learning things about life that could never be studied before. Ironically, the technology enabling much of this change is the same one that launched the study of modern biology centuries ago: the light or optical microscope. A congruence of factors has shuttled these instruments back into the forefront of biology in recent years, after almost a half-century during which they were overshadowed by more powerful techniques such as electron microscopy and x-ray crystallography, which are able to create images on the level of single molecules.

More here. (Note: Do watch some of the stunning video images as well).

From Space Daily:

A team of researchers from Case Western Reserve University has found that gravitational radiation-widely expected to provide “smoking gun” proof for a theory of the early universe known as “inflation”-can be produced by another mechanism. According to physics scholars, inflation theory proposes that the universe underwent a period of exponential expansion right after the big bang.

A key prediction of inflation theory is the presence of a particular spectrum of “gravitational radiation”-ripples in the fabric of space-time that are notoriously difficult to detect but believed to exist nonetheless.

“If we see a primordial gravitational wave background, we can no longer say for sure it is due to inflation,” said Lawrence Krauss, the Ambrose Swasey Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Case Western Reserve.

At the same time the researchers find that gravitational waves are a far more sensitive probe of new physics near the highest energy scale of interest to particle physicists than previously envisaged. Thus their work provides strong motivation for the ongoing quest to detect primordial gravitational radiation.

More here.  [Thanks to Pete Chapman.]

Thomas H. Maugh II in the Los Angeles Times:

An Italian team on Wednesday renewed its claim to have discovered evidence for the existence of dark matter, the invisible material that makes up the bulk of the universe.

Critics say the University of Rome team has answered some of the objections to their earlier findings but not all of them, leaving their claims still a subject of great controversy.

“This is a Nobel Prize-winning result if it is proved,” said physicist Richard Gaitskell of Brown University, who was not involved in the research. “But it needs to be confirmed, and the experiment really has to demonstrate a total mastery of the data. Neither of those criteria have been achieved, and therefore you have to bring a healthy skepticism to the result as it stands.”

The dark matter in question is called weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs. Even though these dark-matter analogs of conventional particles are thought to be much larger than their visible-matter counterparts, they rarely interact with the visible world — making their detection extremely difficult.

At least two international projects based in the United States have been attempting to find evidence for dark matter, so far without success.

More here.  [Thanks to Winfield J. Abbe.]