In A Part of Speech Less Than One, his first collection of essays, Joseph Brodsky tells a story of a day in the gulag when the guards challenged the prisoners to a wood chopping competition. One inmate asked what would happen if he refused. (I've given away my copy of the collection, or more properly, given away my third copy to a third someone, so I'm paraphrasing in a prose far less compelling than the original–meaning both an excuse and a recommendation that you read the essay.) The guards apparently replied, then you don't eat. The competition starts, and the prisoner get to chopping until lunch, when all go to eat save the man who asked the question. He continues to chop and not only through lunch. He chops through dinner and through much of night, and over this time the guards move from ridiculing this odd act of defiance to watching in horror and eventually turning away.

Read more »

A sea change underway: in the Des Moines Register:

The Iowa Supreme Court this morning unanimously upheld gays’ right to marry.

“The Iowa statute limiting civil marriage to a union between a man and a woman violates the equal protection clause of the Iowa Constitution,” the justices said in a summary of their decision.

The court rules that gay marriage would be legal in three weeks, starting April 24.

The court affirmed a Polk County District Court decision that would allow six gay couples to marry.

The ruling is viewed as a victory for the gay rights movement in Iowa and elsewhere, and a setback for social conservatives who wanted to protect traditional families.

The decision makes Iowa the first Midwestern state, and the fourth nationwide, to allow same-sex marriages. Lawyers for Lambda Legal, a gay rights group that financed the court battle and represented the couples, had hoped to use a court victory to demonstrate acceptance of same-sex marriage in heartland America.

Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

Martin Kippenberger was a wreck. When he finally died at 44, he'd so beaten himself up with drink and bad living that the grave must have been a relief. The show currently on view at MoMA, “Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective,” is something like a catalogue of everything Kippenberger had been doing in the years before he finally expired. There are doodles on scraps of paper and delicate water color scenes, announcement cards and his collections of music. There are sculptures created through the arrangement of assorted pieces of used and modified furniture and full-scale oil works on canvas. Everything is represented, from the offhand gesture to the fully intentional work. Kippenberger, it seems, could not stop making art. Yet, he rarely seems to have been pleased by that state of affairs. The theme of shame appears throughout. Kippenberger was sometimes ashamed to be Kippenberger. Thus two of his now famous dunce-in-the-corner sculptures titled, “Martin, Into the Corner, You Should Be Ashamed of Yourself.” In these sculptures, a clothed mannequin stands, head bowed, in the corner.

There is also, of course, a note of defiance in those sculptures. This defiance, this ability to revel in his own shame comes out most majestically in the series of self-portraits he completed in the late 1980s. Clothed in what seems to be a large diaper, the fat and disheveled Kippenberger lumbers around the canvas like some prehistoric beast hastening its own extinction. That was Kippenberger — poignant and pathetic and always able to extort a chuckle from his otherwise horrified public.

Over at UK Gay News:

More than 100 prisoners in Iraq are facing execution – and some of them are believed to have been convicted of a ‘gay crime’, the UK-based Iraqi-LGBT group revealed this afternoon.

According to Ali Hili of Iraqi-LGBT, the Iraqi authorities plan to start executing them in batches of 20 from this week. There is, said Mr. Hili, at least one member of Iraqi-LGBT who are among those to be put to death.

And the London-based group, which believes that a total of 128 executions are imminent, is calling on the UK Government, international human rights groups and the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva to intervene “with due speed” to prevent “this tragic miscarriage of justice” from going ahead.

“We have information and reports on members of our community whom been arrested and waiting for execution for the crimes of homosexuality,” Mr Hili told UK Gay News.

“Iraqi-LGBT has been a banned from running activities on Iraqi soil,” he revealed, adding that he believes that there could be as many as five convicted and sentenced for belonging to Iraqi-LGBT.

The NYT Magazine profile of Freeman Dyson and his dissent position on climate change has provoked a lot of responses from the science blogosphere. John Conway over at Cosmic Variance:

I am not convinced at all that in 10 years we can “Repower America” and eliminate fossil fuels. And the rest of the world certainly won’t. That doesn’t mean we should not try, should not do research into new, non-carbon-based energy sources, expand our use of renewable, clean energy. We should! I am just very skeptical that it could be done even if it became the #1 national priority. It seems to me to violate physics itself, not to mention basic economic facts. Twenty years? Thirty? Eventually it will be clear to every one that we don’t really have a choice.

Read more »

Was Shakespeare a hottie? Was Homer a hunk? John Milton: six-pack abs? Dante: hot or not? You would think, from recent coverage of the portrait newly claimed to be of Shakespeare (a claim front-paged by the New York Times early last month) that these are valid literary questions rather than evidence that the culture of celebrity has irretrievably corrupted literature. Fortunately, the Times story was written by the redoubtable John Burns, who included a good dose of skepticism. Nonetheless, the piece did quote the promotional brochure that is to accompany an exhibition of the “newly discovered” Shakespeare portrait that opens at the Stratford-on-Avon Shakespeare Center on April 23, the bard’s birthday. The quotation tells us everything that is wrong with Shakespearean biography—indeed, with most literary biography—and reminded me of the recent profoundly clueless sexsational controversy over the singularity of Hitler’s testicle.

more from Slate here.

Try this: Gazing straight ahead (as you will no doubt at some point be urged to do if you start hanging out with Trevor and Ryan Oakes for any length of time these days), extend your right arm straight out to your side, perpendicular to your gaze, your hand in a fist, your thumb pointing upward, starting out from behind your ear and now slowly arcing the arm forward. (The Oakes boys, that is: identical twins, just past twenty-five years old, both artists, now living in New York City but before that from out of West Virginia.) At first you won’t see the upraised thumb, of course, but presently, there it will appear, at the periphery of your vision. Keep moving your arm forward until the thumb’s extended out there straight in front of your face at the center of your gaze; now with your left hand extended, thumb up, hand off the arcing transit, as it were, continuing along until eventually that thumb disappears behind your other ear. The thing is (as the Twins will explain with earnest enthusiasm and at quite considerable length), there was only a short part of that transit where you were seeing the thumbs with both eyes and hence with any sort of depth perception. Through most of the rest of the experiment, your nose was blocking the vision from out of one, and then the other, eye. And yet your brain, your visual cortex, was weaving the scene into one continuous, undifferentiated experience. (“Pretty cool, no?” By now the Twins will have veritably lit up with boyish enthusiasm.)

more from VQR here.

Is the American west a place or an idea? This is the question at the heart of an exhibition of photographs that opened last week at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and of the book that accompanies it. The answer, of course, is both: geographically, it is the part of the United States west of the Mississippi; metaphorically, it is synonymous with freedom, escape, enterprise, individualism and all manner of new starts. In this, it reflects many qualities that Americans claim as their birthright. From the mid-19th century the belief in “Manifest Destiny” – that it was God’s will that Americans should occupy the country all the way to the Pacific – drove the gradual colonisation from the east, including the driving out of Native Americans and annexing of land for farming, mining, the building of railways and, later, nuclear test sites, military bases and chemical waste dumps. This exhibition looks at how the idea of the west took hold, even as the land that had inspired it was being plundered and destroyed, and suggests that photography has been one of the principal motors of that exchange.

more from The Guardian here.

Robert Appelbaum in The International Literary Quarterly:

What’s all the fuss about? That was my question. To listen to Londoners, in the past twenty years the city had become a world capital of cuisine, its best restaurants on par with the best anywhere, its ethnic restaurants the envy of Europe. Encouraged by the flourishing of farmer’s markets, a new ethic of organic and locally sourced produce and animal products, and an infrastructure of food obsession, featured daily on television, the print media, and the Internet, its food culture was said to be vibrant, innovative, even world-shaking. The Guide Michelin for restaurants has for the first time devoted a whole volume to it, making it only the fourth city to be so documented, after Paris, New York, and San Francisco, and causing not a few outbursts of superbia among the locals.¹ Indeed, I have heard well travelled Londoners say they prefer their home town to Paris, which is too much of a museum to their taste. There are no new ideas in Paris, the feeling goes, nothing but the tried and true – steak frites and moules frites and, if you’re lucky, a very old cassoulet. In London, by contrast, just about anywhere you go you are going to be served the next new thing – and very likely by a Frenchman, who has fled his homeland for more fertile kitchens.

More here.

From Nature:

Slurping up cold streams of star fuel, some of the Universe's first galaxies got fat quickly, new observations suggest. The findings could overturn existing models for the formation and evolution of galaxies that predict their slow and steady growth through mergers.

Researchers using the Subaru telescope in Hawaii have identified five distant galaxy clusters that formed five billion years after the Big Bang. They calculated the mass of the biggest galaxy in each of the clusters and found, to their surprise, that the ancient galaxies were roughly as big as the biggest galaxies in equivalent clusters in today's Universe. The ancient galaxies should have been much smaller, at only a fifth of today's mass, based on galaxy-formation models that predict slow, protracted growth. “That was the reason for the surprise — that it disagrees so radically with what the predictions told us we should be seeing,” says Chris Collins of Liverpool John Moores University in Birkenhead, UK. Collins and his colleagues publish the work today in Nature.

More here.

Ken Rogoff in The Korea Times:

A huge struggle is brewing within the G-20 over the future of the global financial system. The outcome could impact the world ― and not only the esoteric world of international finance ― for decades to come.

Finance shapes power, ideas, and influence. Cynics may say that nothing will happen to the fundamentals of the global financial system, but they are wrong. In all likelihood, we will see huge changes in the next few years, quite possibly in the form of an international financial regulator or treaty.

Indeed, it is virtually impossible to resolve the current mess without some kind of compass pointing to where the future system lies.

The United States and Britain naturally want a system conducive to extending their hegemony. U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has recently advanced the broad outlines of a more conservative financial regulatory regime.

Even critics of past U.S. profligacy must admit that the Geithner proposal contains some good ideas.

Above all, regulators would force financiers to hold more cash on hand to cover their own bets, and not rely so much on taxpayers as a backstop.

Geithner also aims to make financial deals simpler and easier to evaluate, so that boards, regulators, and investors can better assess the risks they face.

While the rest of the world is sympathetic to Geithner's ideas, other countries would like to see more fundamental reform.

In the LRB, Marina Warner on Edward Fitzgerald's version of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám:

A glass-fronted Regency bookcase in a corner of the London Library opposite the lift holds a collection of rare and beautiful editions of Edward FitzGerald’s poem, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Since its first publication in 1859, it has appeared in every size and shape, giant and toy, on vellum and silk, in fabulous bindings stamped with peacocks’ tails and nightingales’ eyes; it has been printed by masters for tiny private presses, handwritten and illustrated by artists – beginning with the trio of William Morris, Burne-Jones and Charles Fairfax Murray, who helped launch the work after some friends came across it in a remainders box outside Quaritch’s. Two years had passed since the bookseller first published it, at the price of 1s, and not a single copy, it seems, had been sold.

That same year, 1861, Rossetti and Swinburne took it up with enthusiasm. Across the Atlantic, the American artist Elihu Vedder, a specialist in antiquarian Eastern fantasies, whose writhing snakes of healing wisdom and forbidding, yet full-breasted, goddesses of scholarship, history and memory still greet readers at the Library of Congress, followed the Pre-Raphaelite lead and produced a lavish edition of Omar Khayyám in 1884. The poem continued to attract devotees, and a whole company of eccentrics: the splendid London Library cache – more than 300 Rubáiyáts – was put together by the polymorphous Orientalist Edward Heron-Allen, who was an expert in cheirosophy (palm-reading), the leading light in the field of fidicinology (the study of instruments played with a bow), and wrote the definitive work on barnacles. Heron-Allen struggled to identify which poems by Omar Khayyám FitzGerald had rendered into English, the task proving so labyrinthine that he effectively had to back-translate FitzGerald’s quatrains into Persian. Baron Corvo did a version; Augustus John supplied the images for a translation into Romany Welsh. More recently, W.G. Sebald searched out FitzGerald’s grave in the churchyard in the village of Boulge in Suffolk, and, in the same way that FitzGerald chose to speak through Omar Khayyám, Sebald seems in The Rings of Saturn to speak through FitzGerald when he describes with evident fellow-feeling the poet’s misanthropic solitude.

Over at the CBC, Margaret Atwood discusses debt in the 2008 Massey lectures.

One of the many impressive features of Margaret Atwood's new book is its almost eerie timeliness. Consisting of five chapters that were broadcast in November 2008 by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation as the Massey Lectures, a series intended to provide a radio venue for the exploration of important issues, Payback appeared in print last October. The book must have been written some months earlier, but there is no sign that it was composed in haste. Atwood examines the role of ideas of debt in religion, literature, and society; she discusses the nature of sin, the structure of plot in fiction, the practice of revenge, and the ecological payback that occurs when human beings take from the planet more than they return. A celebrated novelist, poet, and critic, Atwood has combined rigorous analysis, wide-ranging erudition, and a beguilingly playful imagination to produce the most probing and thought-stirring commentary on the financial crisis to date.

Atwood's project is to show how human thought has been deeply shaped by notions of debt. It will be objected that she is merely spinning out an extended metaphor suggesting analogies between debt and noneconomic phenomena that are only vaguely analogous. In fact she is advancing the contrary and more interesting claim that economic activities involving borrowing and lending are metaphorical extensions of an underlying human sense of indebtedness. Beliefs about debt are not shadows cast by processes of market exchange. They are presupposed throughout much of human activity. Economic life invokes a sense of order in human affairs, widely dispersed throughout society.

Well, call me old-fashioned if you will, but I have always taken the view that swastika symbols exist for one purpose only—to be defaced. Telling my two companions to hold on for a second, I flourish my trusty felt-tip and begin to write some offensive words on the offending poster. I say “begin” because I have barely gotten to the letter k in a well-known transitive verb when I am grabbed by my shirt collar by a venomous little thug, his face glittering with hysterical malice. With his other hand, he is speed-dialing for backup on his cell phone. As always with episodes of violence, things seem to slow down and quicken up at the same time: the eruption of mayhem in broad daylight happening with the speed of lightning yet somehow held in freeze-frame. It becomes evident, as the backup arrives, that this gang wants to take me away. I am as determined as I can be that I am not going to be stuffed into the trunk of some car and borne off to a private dungeon (as has happened to friends of mine in Beirut in the past).

more from Vanity Fair here.

The first article on Philip Larkin ever to appear in the British press was published anonymously in the Times Educational Supplement, once the younger sister paper to the TLS, in 1956, when the poet was thirty-four years old. In his reply to a letter from an American professor who had written in 1958 to ask him for some biographical details, Larkin wrote:

The best and indeed the only source of information about me is an article in the Times Educational Supplement on 13 July 1956 which I assume you will be able to see. This gives details of biography, education and publications, along with a rather unpleasant photograph . . . . If necessary I could supply a copy of the article I mentioned, but since I have only a very small and diminishing stock of these I should be relieved if you could find a copy or photocopy within the United States.

This article was written by me – with considerable input from Larkin himself.

more from the TLS here.

The family of Karl Wittgenstein, who was one of Austria’s richest men when he died, in 1913, may deserve some gloomy sort of prize, the Palm of Atreus, perhaps. His youngest child, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, once asked a pupil if he had ever had any tragedies in his life. The pupil, evidently well trained, inquired what he meant by “tragedy.” “I mean suicides, madness, or quarrels,” replied Ludwig, three of whose four brothers committed suicide, two of them (Rudi and Hans) in their early twenties, and the third (Kurt) at the age of forty. Ludwig often thought of doing so, as did his surviving brother, Paul. A budding concert pianist when he lost his right arm to a Russian bullet, in 1914, Paul was imprisoned for a time in the infamous Siberian fortress where Dostoyevsky had set his novel “The House of the Dead.” Ludwig later claimed to have first entertained thoughts of suicide at around the age of ten, before any of his brothers had died. There were three sisters: Gretl, Helene, and Hermine. Hermine, the eldest child (she was born in 1874; Ludwig, the youngest, arrived fifteen years later), and the guardian of her father’s flame, never married. Helene was highly neurotic, and had a husband who suffered from dementia. Gretl was regarded as irritating by most people, including her unpleasant husband, who committed suicide, as did his father and one of his aunts. Bad temper and extreme nervous tension were endemic in the family. One day, when Paul was practicing at one of the seven grand pianos in their winter home, the Palais Wittgenstein, he leaped up and shouted at his brother Ludwig in the room next door, “I cannot play when you are in the house, as I feel your skepticism seeping towards me from under the door!”

more from The New Yorker here.

From The Times:

The monster Caliban, according to his master, Prospero, was “a devil, a pure devil, on whose nature nurture can never stick”. Yet only a few decades before Shakespeare wrote The Tempest, St Ignatius Loyola had founded the Jesuit order, with its famous maxim: “Give me the child until he is 7, and I will show you the man.” This ancient debate over the relative contributions of inheritance and experience to the human condition has never been more charged than in the genetic age. On one side stood those who sought and saw genetic explanations for human psychology; on the other, those who believed it to be moulded by culture. There was little common ground. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, an evolutionary psychologist, has even joked that perhaps we are genetically programmed to set nature against nurture.

Since the middle of the last century the nurture camp has been dominant. Just as molecular biology began to unravel the secrets of DNA, genetics and evolution were relegated to psychological bit-players by a new orthodoxy, which held that biology has forged a human mind of almost limitless malleability. It was the doctrine of the blank slate.

The idea, usually traced to the 17th-century philosopher John Locke, grew popular in the Enlightenment, fitting the mood of challenge to the supposedly innate authority of monarchy and aristocracy. It was a statement of individual freedom, which became strongly associated with the political Left. Though many early socialists were enthusiasts for eugenics, later generations grew suspicious of genetics, particularly after it was abused to justify oppression of disadvantaged racial and social groups, most brutally in Nazi Germany. Liberal opinion turned against the concept of a biological human nature, which was increasingly seen as a tool with which male and bourgeois elites could rationalise hegemony.

More here.

From Scientific American:

In science, the grandest revolutions are often triggered by the smallest discrepancies. In the 16th century, based on what struck many of his contemporaries as the esoteric minutiae of celestial motions, Copernicus suggested that Earth was not, in fact, at the center of the universe. In our own era, another revolution began to unfold 11 years ago with the discovery of the accelerating universe. A tiny deviation in the brightness of exploding stars led astronomers to conclude that they had no idea what 70 percent of the cosmos consists of. All they could tell was that space is filled with a substance unlike any other one that pushes along the expansion of the universe rather than holding it back. This substance became known as dark energy.

It is now over a decade later, and the existence of dark energy is still so puzzling that some cosmologists are revisiting the fundamental postulates that led them to deduce its existence in the first place. One of these is the product of that earlier revolution: the Copernican principle, that Earth is not in a central or otherwise special position in the universe. If we discard this basic principle, a surprisingly different picture of what could account for the observations emerges.

More here.

Celestial Music
Louise Gluck

I have a friend who still believes in heaven.
Not a stupid person, yet with all she knows, she literally talks
…to god,
she thinks someone listens in heaven.
On earth, she's unusually competent.
Brave, too, able to face unpleasantness.
…
We found a caterpillar dying in the dirt, greedy ants crawling
…over it.
I'm always moved by weakness, by disaster, always eager to
oppose vitality.
But timid, also, quick to shut my eyes.
Whereas my friend was able to watch, to let events play out
according to nature. For my sake, she intervened,
brushing a few ants off the torn thing, and set it down across
…the road.
…
My friend says I shut my eyes to god, that nothing else
…explains
my aversion to reality. She says I'm like the child who buries
…her head in the pillow
so as not to see, the child who tells herself
that light causes sadness—
My friend is like the mother. Patient, urging me
to wake up an adult like herself, a courageous person—
…
In my dreams, my friend reproaches me. We're walking
on the same road, except it's winter now;
she's telling me that when you love the world you hear celestial
…music:
look up, she says. When I look up, nothing.
Only clouds, snow, a white business in the trees
like brides leaping to a great height—
Then I'm afraid for her; I see her
caught in a net deliberately cast over the earth—
…
In reality, we sit by the side of the road, watching the sun set;
from time to time, the silence pierced by a birdcall.
It's this moment we're both trying to explain, the fact
that we're at ease with death, with solitude.
My friend draws a circle in the dirt; inside, the caterpillar
…doesn't move.
She's always trying to make something whole, something
…beautiful, an image
capable of life apart from her.
We're very quiet. It's peaceful sitting here, not speaking, the
…composition
fixed, the road turning suddenly dark, the air
going cool, here and there the rocks shining and glittering—
it's this stillness that we both love.
The love of form is a love of endings.