From Edge.org:

Click here to watch video, read transcript, and much more. Very interesting!

When Patrick Hamilton wrote to his brother, Bruce, of the “magnifying influence of beer—the neurotics’ microscope,” he wasn’t blowing smoke; he was faithfully expressing what for him had assumed the knife-sharp form of dogma. For Hamilton, one of the hardest-drinking authors of the twentieth century, there was more in his topped-off flask than the boozy business, though; he deftly mastered an entire worldview of late-’30s and early-’40s London and the precincts his working-class subjects haunted—not just the grubby alcoholism, the evenings of ale and pink gin and whiskey, and the fevered attempts to find an establishment open after last call but also the more plebeian desire for tea at the ABC shops and leviathan Lyons Corner Houses, one of which could seat five thousand teacup-holding Englishmen, their class anxiety served up amid marble staircases and the anodyne twinklings of a for-hire orchestra.

more from bookforum here.

From MSNBC:

Hot on the heels of see-through frogs, researchers at Children’s Hospital Boston have bred see-through zebrafish that put tumors and stem cells on display as they grow. The transparent lab animals already have started to provide insights into how cancer spreads – and how it can be treated – in not-so-transparent human beings. The fish breeding project and its application to medical research are described in Thursday’s issue of the journal Cell Stem Cell as well as a news release from Children’s. Zebrafish, like frogs and mice, are frequently used as experimental models for diseases and biological processes seen in humans as well.

Usually, researchers allow the animals to get a disease analogous to the human malady, then kill and dissect the animal. But when it comes to cancer progression, scientists would prefer to see how the process works in a live animal. Scientists have used transparent zebrafish embryos for that purpose, but when the fish reach adulthood, they turn opaque. That effectively closes the shutters over a valuable window for research. “Everything after four weeks has been invisible to us,” Dr. Richard White, a clinical fellow in Children’s stem cell program and an instructor of medicine at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, explained in today’s news release.

More here.

Let’s say that you’ve recently polished off your local library’s collection of vampire sonnets, and perhaps even flipped, with a melancholy hand, the final page of your older brother’s three-volume haiku sequence about a marauding colony of Minotaurs—that you’ve exhausted, in other words, the literary exploration of monster subcultures written in obscure forms. Well, take heart. Toby Barlow’s first book, Sharp Teeth, is a verse novel about werewolves. This makes it not only a decisive answer (nay!) to the age-old question “Is long-form monster poetry dead?” but also a perfect marriage of form and subject: Both the werewolf and the verse novel (which lopes across the centuries from Pushkin to Browning to Vikram Seth) are shaggy hybrids that appear once in a blue moon and terrify everyone in sight.

more from NY Magazine here.

Museology is in moral crisis after a spate of manic construction that has exalted edifices over their contents, and institutional narcissism over the romance of art lovers and art works. Witness the revamped Museum of Modern Art: it is less a building than a life-size architectural maquette, in which you and I fill the roles of little figures stuck in to convey scale. Our enjoyment of the museum’s unequalled collections feels incidental to another, mysterious purpose, perhaps known only by some executive cabal. I think that unease with the Modern helps to explain the euphoria, of everyone I know in the art world, that has come to attend any visit to the Met—a place that is not only for us but about us, as parishioners of visual high culture. Like ever fewer museum directors today, de Montebello cut his professional teeth as a curator, specializing in European paintings. The open secret of his success is a deep feel for the seriousness, and an identification with the enthusiasm, of his curatorial team. He trusts and abets their yearnings to connect. The payoff is a museum that honors the variety and the alacrity of our interests and appetites, and by “our” I mean that of all who vote with their feet to be present. (Met crowds, though inconveniencing, impart a sweetness of democratic participation like that of the first half hour or so of showing up for jury duty.) With gladness, I note a tincture of that quality in the compact, vernacular spaces and the curatorial tact of an inaugural show of assembled sculpture and collage at the relocated New Museum of Contemporary Art. The New Museum also palpably credits viewers with a will and a right to uncoerced experience. So it can be done, with or without marble pilasters. The tipoff is that you don’t find yourself wondering why anything is designed or presented in the way that it is. To look is to get it.

more from The New Yorker here.

Wood’s criticism has its own knowing relationship with embarrassment. As a critic, he is able to point out things about texts that are, in retrospect, blindingly, even embarrassingly, obvious. His book is brilliant in many ways, particularly in its analysis of the tired jargon that surrounds much formal criticism of the novel. Narrators, he points out, for instance, are very rarely “omniscient”; “free indirect style” is anything but free. Indeed, what is impressive about How Fiction Works is its practical utility. As Wood writes, “I try to ask some of the essential questions about the art of fiction. Is realism real? How do we define a successful metaphor? What is a character? When do we recognise a brilliant use of detail in fiction?”. The problem with general discussions about fiction is that it is hard enough to write about the details of one novel, let alone to comprehend an entire mode. Wood gets round this sense of enormity (what Pierre Bayard terms “the embarrassment around the work”) by resisting taxonomy. Breaking his thoughts down into aphoristic pieces, he concentrates his arguments around a select group of novels. “This little book”, he tells us, is about works he “actually owns”. All his examples are drawn from “the books at hand” in his study. After reading How Fiction Works, one learns that the authors represented in Wood’s study include, among others, D. H. Lawrence, Saul Bellow, Thomas Hardy, Knut Hamsun, Stendhal, Ian McEwan, Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, Henry James, John le Carré, David Foster Wallace and large quantities of Flaubert.

more from the TLS here.

..

In the Hall of Bones
Ted Kooser

Here we store the reassembled
scaffolding, the split, bleached uprights,
the knobby corner locks and braces
that held up the mastadon’s
bag of wet leaves and the ivory
forklift of its head. Over there are
the planks upon which lay the turtle’s
diving bell, and the articulated
rack that kept the dromedary’s hump
from collapsing under the weight
of its perserverance. And here is
the basket that held the clip-clop
pulse of the miniature horse
as it dreamed of growing tall enough
to have lunch from a tree. And then
here’s man, all matchsticks, wooden spoons
and tongue depressors wired together,
a rack supporting a leaky jug
of lust and worry. Of all the skeletons
assembled here, this is the only one
in which once throbbed a heart
made sad by brooding on its shadow.

..

Nat Turner was born on October 2, 1800, in Southampton County, Virginia, the week before Gabriel was hanged. While still a young child, Nat was overheard describing events that had happened before he was born. This, along with his keen intelligence, and other signs marked him in the eyes of his people as a prophet “intended for some great purpose.” A deeply religious man, he “therefore studiously avoided mixing in society, and wrapped [him]self in mystery, devoting [his] time to fasting and praying.”

In 1821, Turner ran away from his overseer, returning after thirty days because of a vision in which the Spirit had told him to “return to the service of my earthly master.” The next year, following the death of his master, Samuel Turner, Nat was sold to Thomas Moore. Three years later, Nat Turner had another vision. He saw lights in the sky and prayed to find out what they meant. Then “… while laboring in the field, I discovered drops of blood on the corn, as though it were dew from heaven, and I communicated it to many, both white and black, in the neighborhood; and then I found on the leaves in the woods hieroglyphic characters and numbers, with the forms of men in different attitudes, portrayed in blood, and representing the figures I had seen before in the heavens.”

At the beginning of the year 1830, Turner was moved to the home of Joseph Travis, the new husband of Thomas Moore’s widow. His official owner was Putnum Moore, still a young child. Turner described Travis as a kind master, against whom he had no complaints. Then, in February, 1831, there was an eclipse of the sun. Turner took this to be the sign he had been promised and confided his plan to the four men he trusted the most, Henry, Hark, Nelson, and Sam. They decided to hold the insurrection on the 4th of July and began planning a strategy. However, they had to postpone action because Turner became ill.

On August 21, Turner and six of his men met in the woods to eat a dinner and make their plans. At 2:00 that morning, they set out to the Travis household, where they killed the entire family as they lay sleeping. They continued on, from house to house, killing all of the white people they encountered. Turner’s force eventually consisted of more than 40 slaves, most on horseback.

Nat Turner hid in several different places near the Travis farm, but on October 30 was discovered and captured. His “Confession,” dictated to physician Thomas R. Gray, was taken while he was imprisoned in the County Jail. On November 5, Nat Turner was tried in the Southampton County Court and sentenced to execution. He was hanged, and then skinned, on November 11.

In total, the state executed 55 people, banished many more, and acquitted a few. The state reimbursed the slaveholders for their slaves. But in the hysterical climate that followed the rebellion, close to 200 black people, many of whom had nothing to do with the rebellion, were murdered by white mobs. In addition, slaves as far away as North Carolina were accused of having a connection with the insurrection, and were subsequently tried and executed.

The state legislature of Virginia considered abolishing slavery, but in a close vote decided to retain slavery and to support a repressive policy against black people, slave and free.

More here.

Scott McLemee in Inside Higher Ed on the Avakian ad:

In the weeks since it appeared, a few friends who knew of my longstanding fascination with the Chairman Bob phenomenon asked about the New York Review ad. They were surprised to see it, and wondered whether all these people had actually taken up the cause of Avakianism.

My best guess, rather, was that very few of the signatories had read much Avakian. The abundance and verbosity of his pamphlets would exceed the stamina of any but the most disciplined of revolutionary intellectuals. What probably happened, I surmised, was that party cadres had pointed out various anti-Bush statements by Avakian in order to harvest a bunch of signatures from people who were angered by the course of recent history.

At the same time, it was easy to imagine how other people would probably understand the ad. They would look at it and conclude that the signatories were, in fact, hardcore militants looking to Avakian for leadership in establishing a revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry.

The belief that academia contains literally tens of thousands of such people has, of course, no basis in reality. But it is evidently quite profitable. There is an audience for such claims (the rate of propagation of suckers-per-minute having intensified since P.T. Barnum’s day) and it constitutes a more robust market than the one for Marxist-Leninist pamphlets. One pictures right-wing interns stuffing envelopes with reprinted copies of the NYRB advertisement and sending it to the hinterlands – and humming “We’re in the Money” all the while.

In The American Prospect, Ezra Klein on the choice between Hillary and Obama:

Many of Clinton’s economic plans are universal as well. Indeed, her health-care plan, with its mandate, is a truer expression of the principle than Obama’s competing proposal. But in general, Clinton’s approach doesn’t display much of a unifying theme. Her health plan is universal because that makes it a better policy, not because she conceives of social policy within a universalistic framework as such. Which gets to the real difference between the two candidates, which is not in what they want to do with the economy, or even what they believe about it, but how they conceive of the president’s role in affecting it.

Where Obama speaks of trends and values, situating his policies within the broader forces shaping our culture as well as our society, Clinton speaks of individual problems and solitary obstacles, offering her proposals as discrete solutions to identifiable challenges. Her approach was well expressed in a speech she gave in Knoxville, Iowa. “The next president,” she said, “will be a steward of our economy at a time when the bills from eight years of neglect and mismanagement will be coming due.”

That is why, when you ask Clinton’s advisers about their economic plans, they’re likely to point you toward various policies she’s proposed and pieces of legislation she’s sponsored, most of which are admirable, forward-thinking, and thoughtfully designed. That is what a responsible economic steward does: competently manage the economy; identify and propose policies to solve problems when appropriate; leave things alone if they’re humming along satisfactorily.

Obama’s advisers, by contrast, are likely to point you toward his speech at the NASDAQ, which highlighted his desire to transform our economy through the application of moral leadership. There, Obama went before an audience of bankers and stockbrokers and spoke, not of our growth numbers or our credit problems but of our economic values…

In the LRB, Henry Siegman:

The breaching of the barrier between Gaza and Egypt by Gaza’s imprisoned population dramatised two fundamental realities about which Israeli and US policymakers have been in complete denial. First, that sooner or later Gazans would seek to break out of their open-air jail. That they have done so should be applauded not condemned. It would have been a sad comment on the human spirit had Gaza’s citizens surrendered to their fate.

Israel’s claim that the strangulation of Gaza was intended to provoke its population into overthrowing Hamas is absurd – and offensive. It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that the draconian restrictions imposed by Israel on Gaza’s civilian residents redirected against their Israeli tormentors what anger existed among them towards Hamas for its ideological rigidity and its refusal to halt rocket assaults on Israel. As recent opinion polls have found, the suffering caused by the Gaza closures produced greater solidarity not greater divisiveness. It even moved Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad to public displays of anger (however disingenuous) against Ehud Olmert’s government.

..

A Supermarket in California
Allen Ginsberg

…………………………………………………………………….
…………………………………………………………………….
What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I
walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache
self-conscious looking at the full moon.

In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into
the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!

What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families
shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the
avocados, babies in the tomatoes!–and you, Garcia Lorca, what
were you doing down by the watermelons?

I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber,
poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the
grocery boys.

I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork
chops? What price bananas? Are you my Angel?

I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans
following you, and followed in my imagination by the store
detective.

We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary
fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and
never passing the cashier.

Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an
hour. Which way does your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the
supermarket and feel absurd.)

Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees
add shade to shade, lights out in the houses, we’ll both be
lonely.

Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue
automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?

Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what
America did you leave when Charon quit poling his ferry and
you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat
disappear on the black waters of Lethe?

..

From Edge:

One hundred and sixty-five eminent thinkers, researchers, and communicators, at the annual request of the edge.org website, answered the following question: “What Have You Changed Your Mind About? Why?”

The obligation of a scientist to do science

Leon Lederman, Nobel Laureate in Physics (author of The God Particle)

I have always believed that the scientist’s most sacred obligation is to continue to do science. Now I know that I was dead wrong. I am driven to the ultimately wise advice of my Columbia mentor, I.I. Rabi, who, in our many corridor bull sessions, urged his students to run for public office and get elected. He insisted that to be an advisor (he was an advisor to Oppenheimer at Los Alamos, later to Eisenhower and to the AEC) was ultimately an exercise in futility and that the power belonged to those who are elected. Then, we thought the old man was bonkers. But today… A Congress which is overwhelmingly dominated by lawyers and MBAs makes no sense in this 21st century in which almost all issues have a science and technology aspect.

More here.

Booker T. Washington recalled his childhood in his autobiography, Up From Slavery. He was born in 1856 on the Burroughs tobacco farm which, despite its small size, he always referred to as a “plantation.” His mother was a cook, his father a white man from a nearby farm. “The early years of my life, which were spent in the little cabin,” he wrote, “were not very different from those of other slaves.”

He went to school in Franklin County – not as a student, but to carry books for one of James Burroughs’s daughters. It was illegal to educate slaves. “I had the feeling that to get into a schoolhouse and study would be about the same as getting into paradise,” he wrote. In April 1865 the Emancipation Proclamation was read to joyful slaves in front of the Burroughs home. Booker’s family soon left to join his stepfather in Malden, West Virginia. The young boy took a job in a salt mine that began at 4 a.m. so he could attend school later in the day. Within a few years, Booker was taken in as a houseboy by a wealthy towns-woman who further encouraged his longing to learn. At age 16, he walked much of the 500 miles back to Virginia to enroll in a new school for black students. He knew that even poor students could get an education at Hampton Institute, paying their way by working. The head teacher was suspicious of his country ways and ragged clothes. She admitted him only after he had cleaned a room to her satisfaction.

In one respect he had come full circle, back to earning his living by menial tasks. Yet his entrance to Hampton led him away from a life of forced labor for good. He became an instructor there. Later, as principal and guiding force behind Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, which he founded in 1881, he became recognized as the nation’s foremost black educator.

More here.

Janelle Nanos in National Geographic Traveler:

We can’t help but think that Eric Weiner’s research for his new book, The Geography of Bliss, would have gone a lot easier if he’d paired up with Erik Krikortz, the installation artist behind Stockholm’s Emotional Cities project. The Internet-based artwork asks people to answer a simple question: “How Are You Today?” and rate their feelings on a scale of colorful smiley faces. Factors like how well you slept, whether you had any physical activity, and how inspired you felt are all part of the equation. The results are then averaged and aggregated by region to get a sense of how a city is collectively feeling. Right now, for example, Washington, D.C., is rather green, while the rest of the world is feeling a bit more yellow.

Erik then went further and negotiated with a building company in Stockholm, where he resides, to project the corresponding colors on huge panels on the side of five buildings. (A live Webcam shows how the lights change with Stockholm’s moods.) The result is a very public display of the emotional status of the city, sparking conversations about how we interact with each other and influence our feelings.

More here.  [Thanks to Marilyn Terrell.]

For more info, go here.

Benedict Carey in the New York Times:

Stare into a mirror long enough and it’s hard not to wonder whether that’s a mask staring back, and if so, who’s really behind it.

A similar self-doubt can cloud a public identity as well, especially for anyone who has just stepped into a new role. College graduate. New mother. Medical doctor. Even, for that matter, presidential nominee.

Presidents and parents, after all, are expected to make crucial decisions on a dime. Doctors are being asked to save lives, and graduate students to know how Aristotle’s conception of virtue differed from Aquinas’s conception of — uh-oh.

Who’s kidding whom?

Social psychologists have studied what they call the impostor phenomenon since at least the 1970s, when a pair of therapists at Georgia State University used the phrase to describe the internal experience of a group of high-achieving women who had a secret sense they were not as capable as others thought. Since then researchers have documented such fears in adults of all ages, as well as adolescents.

More here.

The first work by Hannah Arendt that I read, at the age of sixteen, was Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.[1] It remains, for me, the emblematic Arendt text. It is not her most philosophical book. It is not always right; and it is decidedly not her most popular piece of writing. I did not even like the book myself when I first read it—I was an ardent young Socialist-Zionist and Arendt’s conclusions profoundly disturbed me. But in the years since then I have come to understand that Eichmann in Jerusalem represents Hannah Arendt at her best: attacking head-on a painful topic; dissenting from official wisdom; provoking argument not just among her critics but also and especially among her friends; and above all, disturbing the easy peace of received opinion. It is in memory of Arendt the “disturber of the peace” that I want to offer a few thoughts on a subject which, more than any other, preoccupied her political writings.

more from the NYRB here.

Anyone vaguely familiar with the early history of the Russian Revolution will recall the one or two lines in every textbook about Marshal Pilsudski’s legionaries stopping the Red Army before the gates of Warsaw in August 1920. The outcome is almost taken for granted. The Soviet forces, embroiled in a civil war of immeasurable savagery, were perhaps too weak to do much more; Poles were defending the independence so recently won in the Versailles settlement and fought with a stubborn nationalism. Some of this is true, but as Adam Zamoyski reminds us in this crisp account of an almost unknown war, the outcome was far from pre-ordained. If it is difficult to believe that the Soviets would have established an early version of the Cold War bloc had they won, it is also difficult to see who could have ejected them once they straddled Eastern Europe.

The story told here is a straightforward account of a short, sharp war which took place from April to October 1920 between two infant states, Polish and Soviet. The hero of the story is one of the great names of modern Polish history, Joseph Pilsudski.

more from Literary Review here.