Samia Altaf in The Wilson Quarterly:

“She’s what?” I heard my companion ask in a ­panic-­stricken tone. “Dead! Oh, my God, do you hear that?” she said to me. “The director of the nursing council is dead.” She stood still for a minute, as if paying her respects. “How did she die?” she said, again turning to the ­fellow.

The man looked offended at our misapprehension. “Late. Mrs. S.,” he said. Ah, Mrs. S. wasn’t dead. She would be ­late.

My companion, a Canadian, was new to this part of the world and understandably confused by the way Urdu, the national language, is translated into English, the “official” language, especially by people who have minimal schooling. Mrs. S. had gone from merely being late to being “the late Mrs. S.” In a way, this slip of the ­tongue—­or of the ear?—was quite symbolic. For in its efforts to make any effective contribution to the changing needs of the health care system, the Pakistan Nursing ­Council—­the federal institution that oversees nursing and all related ­professions—­might as well have been ­dead.

We told the man that we would ­wait.

For the past several weeks, my Canadian colleague and I had been traveling through Pakistan as we prepared recommendations for a technical assistance program funded by the Canadian government. She was the external consultant on this project, and I was the local consultant.

More here.

Margalit Fox in the New York Times:

Carol Chomsky, a linguist and education specialist whose work helped illuminate the ways in which language comes to children, died on Friday at her home in Lexington, Mass. She was 78.

The cause was cancer, her sister-in-law Judith Brown Chomsky said.

A nationally recognized authority on the acquisition of spoken and written language, Professor Chomsky was on the faculty of the Harvard Graduate School of Education from 1972 until her retirement in 1997. In retirement, she was a frequent traveling companion of her husband, the linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky, as he delivered his public lectures.

Carol Chomsky was perhaps best known for her book, “The Acquisition of Syntax in Children From 5 to 10” (M.I.T. Press), which was considered a landmark study in the field when it appeared in 1969. In it, she investigated children’s tacit, developing awareness of the grammatical structure of their native language, and their ability to use that awareness to extract meaning from increasingly complex sentences over time.

More here. [Photo shows Carol and Noam Chomsky.]

Israeli blockade 'forces Palestinians to search rubbish dumps for food'.

Peter Beaumont in The Guardian:

Figures released last week by the UN Relief and Works Agency reveal that the economic blockade imposed by Israel on Gaza in July last year has had a devastating impact on the local population. Large numbers of Palestinians are unable to afford the high prices of food being smuggled through the Hamas-controlled tunnels to the Strip from Egypt and last week were confronted with the suspension of UN food and cash distribution as a result of the siege.

The figures collected by the UN agency show that 51.8% – an “unprecedentedly high” number of Gaza's 1.5 million population – are now living below the poverty line. The agency announced last week that it had been forced to stop distributing food rations to the 750,000 people in need and had also suspended cash distributions to 94,000 of the most disadvantaged who were unable to afford the high prices being asked for smuggled food.

“Things have been getting worse and worse,” said Chris Gunness of the agency yesterday. “It is the first time we have been seeing people picking through the rubbish like this looking for things to eat.

More here.

Joshua Clover in The Nation:

Guy Debord's best lines were ghostwritten.

One particular frame, a blank back and forth between Pancho and Cisco–“The Situationist Cowboys,” as they would be known–has had a long and varied afterlife, leaping from student revolt to photocopied talisman to album art and T-shirt image for Manchester's Factory Records; of late it has shown up on the Poetry Foundation's website, making some point or another.

“What do you work on?” asks the first cowboy, in a white hat. “Reification,” comes the answer. “I see,” says white hat. “It's serious work, with big books and lots of papers on a big table.”

“Nope,” avers black hat, whom we understand to be speaking in the place of Debord. “I drift. Mostly I drift.” The phrase itself is a ghost. It captures the insouciance that in our era can no longer be attached to radical politics, to the ruthless critique of what exists. And exactly because such a combination, so urgently wished for, can no longer be imagined without this phrase, it is doomed to circulate without relief, like Dante's Paolo and Francesca borne about endlessly on an awful wind that is the wind of history. Also, it's a great pickup line.

If you survey the geography of modern letters, three books stand out as signposts marking the beginning of paths that lead decisively away from all that went before. Augustine’s “Confessions,” the first memoir of an inner life, is one such work. So is Miguel de Cervantes’ “Don Quixote,” which is the first inarguably modern novel. The third is James Boswell’s “The Life of Samuel Johnson,” the earliest recognizable modern biography. In our era, scholarship — particularly that of Edmund Wilson and Donald Greene — has been unsparing with regard to Boswell’s ignorance of some facts about his subject and his deliberate withholding of others. He was, in these critics’ estimation, a myth-maker. Fair enough — and so what?

more from the LA Times here.

It has become an overused word, but Giordano Bruno may justly be described as a maverick. Burned at the stake in Rome on Ash Wednesday in 1600, he seems to have been an unclassifiable mixture of foul-mouthed Neapolitan mountebank, loquacious poet, religious reformer, scholastic philosopher and slightly wacky astronomer. His version of Christianity is impossible to label. Educated by the Dominicans — the guardians of Catholic orthodoxy in those days — he revered certain scriptures and the writings of St. Augustine, always doubted the divinity of Jesus and flirted with dangerous new ideas of Protestantism, and yet hoped that the pope himself would clear him of heresy. Bruno was a martyr to something, but four centuries after his immolation it is still not clear what. It doesn’t help that the full records of his 16 interrogations in the prisons of the Roman Inquisition have been lost or destroyed. The enigma of Bruno runs deeper than that, as Ingrid Rowland, a scholar of the Renaissance who teaches in Rome, makes clear in her rich new biography, “Giordano Bruno.”

more from the NY Times here.

From The Telegraph:

When Dickens’s David Copperfield describes his schooldays, his memories quickly fall into the miserable grooves of “tear-blotted copy-books, canings, rulerings, hair-cuttings, rainy Sundays, suet puddings, and a dirty atmosphere of ink surrounding all”. But there is also a more cheering routine that punctuates his time at school: storytelling. Learning that the “romantic and dreamy” Copperfield has a ready fund of stories up his pyjama sleeves, the dashing Steerforth decides that “you shall tell ’em to me”. With a new episode to look forward to every bedtime, “We’ll make some regular Arabian Nights of it.”

To some extent, the passage is a joke about Dickens’s own career, given how often he published his novels in instalments – a Scheherazade who depended on drawing out stories for his livelihood rather than his life. But the joke is also shadowed by a genuine sense of threat. Copperfield’s recollection that “we commenced carrying [the plan] into execution that very evening” reminds us that the original Scheherazade spins out her narrative thread every night to save herself from a far more serious form of “execution”. For her, each sentence is potentially a death sentence; each full stop is potentially the end of both story and storyteller.

More here.

ALEX WITCHEL in The New York Times:

IN SPITE OF MYSELF: A Memoir By Christopher Plummer

Now that Plummer has published “In Spite of Myself: A Memoir,” it is the most welcome of surprises to discover that this actor writes and reports almost as well as he acts. No kidding. To be sure, in his writing he is a bit hammy, often playing fast and loose with time frames, tone and details, not to mention exercising profligate use of exclamation points — the man thinks in soliloquies. But the result for anyone who loves, loves, loves the theater, not to mention the vanished New York of the 1950s and ’60s, is a finely observed, deeply felt (and deeply dishy) time-traveling escape worthy of a long stormy weekend. Just grab a quilt and a stack of pillows. No need for a delectable assortment of bonbons. They’re in the book.

Plummer begins at the beginning. He grows up in Montreal, something of a poor little rich boy, the great-grandson of the Right Honorable Sir John Joseph Caldwell Abbott, who was president of the Canada Central Railway and the country’s first native-born prime minister.

Plummer’s parents divorce early, and his father disappears. As older relatives die, the money falls away and his mother holds down two jobs while her teenage son, bound up in “a web of good manners and suppressed emotions,” finds release in the worlds of jazz, theater and night life. That also means drinking: “At an embarrassingly early age, I began to hit the sauce. Booze was a national sport up north. It was essential! — (a) to keep you warm, (b) to keep you from going mad, (c) to keep your madness going.”

More here.

Charlie Sorrel in Wired:

A British museum curator has built a working replica of a 2,000-year-old Greek machine that has been called the world's first computer.

A dictionary-size assemblage of 37 interlocking dials crafted with the precision and complexity of a 19th-century Swiss clock, the Antikythera mechanism was used for modeling and predicting the movements of the heavenly bodies as well as the dates and locations of upcoming Olympic games.

The original 81 shards of the Antikythera were recovered from under the sea (near the Greek island of Antikythera) in 1902, rusted and clumped together in a nearly indecipherable mass. Scientists dated it to 150 B.C. Such craftsmanship wouldn't be seen for another 1,000 years — but its purpose was a mystery for decades.

Many scientists have worked since the 1950s to piece together the story, with the help of some very sophisticated imaging technology in recent years, including X-ray and gamma-ray imaging and 3-D computer modeling.

Now, though, it has been rebuilt. As is almost always the way with these things, it was an amateur who cracked it. Michael Wright, a former curator at the Science Museum in London, has built a replica of the Antikythera, which works perfectly.

More here.

Alvaro Vargas Llosa in The New Republic:

A lot of what has helped Latin America's economies in recent years — access to capital markets, foreign investments, remittances from emigrants, the price of natural resources — depends on the health of the global marketplace. Anytime the U.S. stock markets lose $30 trillion in a few months — 10 times Latin America's gross domestic product — the ripple effects will be felt south of the Rio Grande.

Rather than engage in reform, slash spending and put away some rainy-day money, Latin American governments preserved the status quo and boosted public expenditures by 10 percent annually in matters mostly unrelated to infrastructure, creating alarming new commitments. Except for Chile, which managed the revenue from its copper sales prudently, many of the nations that produce oil (Mexico, Venezuela, Ecuador), minerals (Brazil, Peru) or agricultural commodities (Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay) went on a binge. They will now find themselves starved for cash at a time when they are pledging new forms of government profligacy in the face of the global recession. The temptation to fund it via inflation will be irresistible.

More here.

Basharat Peer in The National:

I watched the video of Imran Babar’s phone call on a website at my parents’ house in Srinagar, the Kashmiri capital, a day after he called India TV. His voice and accent betrayed his lower-middle-class origins in Pakistani Punjab, far from the Deccan Plateau in southern India – even as he spoke of the oppression of Indian Muslims. But I was struck when he turned to Kashmir, saying: ““What was the Israeli Army chief doing in Kashmir? What is he to the Indian government? An uncle?” His voice was growing agitated and he shouted, “Was he there to teach what the Israelis do in Gaza and what they did to Bait-ul-Muqadas [the al Aqsa Mosque]?”

Here was a Punjabi terrorist who claimed to speak in the name of Kashmiris and Palestinians alike, assuming the mantle of oppressed communities to rationalise the murder of innocents in hotels and train stations. I was rattled, sitting in Srinigar, watching the loud theatre of terror drown out the complexities of life in Kashmir – watching the cause of Kashmiri independence become linked, in the mind of the world, with the deeds of jihadists in Mumbai.

More here.

[Thanks to, well… Ruchira. 🙂 ]

William Grimes in the NYT:

Mr. O’Brien, once described by Christopher Hitchens as “an internationalist, a wit, a polymath and a provocateur,” was a rare combination of scholar and public servant who applied his erudition and stylish pen to a long list of causes, some hopeless, others made less so by his combative reasoning. When called upon, he would put down his pen and enter the fray, more often than not emerging bruised and bloodied.

As a diplomat, he helped chart Ireland’s course as an independent, anticolonialist voice in the United Nations and played a critical role in the UN’s intervention in the Congo in 1961. As vice-chancellor of the University of Ghana he fell out with the dictator Kwame Nkrumah over the question of academic freedom, and while teaching at New York University, he took part in an antiwar demonstration that resulted in his arrest.

Wendell Jamieson in the NYT:

Many are pulling the movie out of the archives lately because of its prescience on the perils of trusting bankers. I’ve found, after repeated viewings, that the film turns upside down and inside out, and some glaring — and often funny — flaws become apparent. These flaws have somehow deepened my affection for it over the years.

Take the extended sequence in which George Bailey (James Stewart), having repeatedly tried and failed to escape Bedford Falls, N.Y., sees what it would be like had he never been born. The bucolic small town is replaced by a smoky, nightclub-filled, boogie-woogie-driven haven for showgirls and gamblers, who spill raucously out into the crowded sidewalks on Christmas Eve. It’s been renamed Pottersville, after the villainous Mr. Potter, Lionel Barrymore’s scheming financier.

Here’s the thing about Pottersville that struck me when I was 15: It looks like much more fun than stultifying Bedford Falls — the women are hot, the music swings, and the fun times go on all night. If anything, Pottersville captures just the type of excitement George had long been seeking.

And what about that banking issue? When he returns to the “real” Bedford Falls, George is saved by his friends, who open their wallets to cover an $8,000 shortfall at his savings and loan brought about when the evil Mr. Potter snatched a deposit mislaid by George’s idiot uncle, Billy (Thomas Mitchell).

Ewen Callaway in New Scientist:

Being dumb has its benefits. Scottish soldiers who survived the second world war were less intelligent than men who gave their lives defeating the Third Reich, a new study of British government records concludes.

The 491 Scots who died and had taken IQ tests at age 11 achieved an average IQ score of 100.8. Several thousand survivors who had taken the same test – which was administered to all Scottish children born in 1921 – averaged 97.4.

The unprecedented demands of the second world war – fought more with brains than with brawn compared with previous wars – might account for the skew, says Ian Deary, a psychologist at the University of Edinburgh, who led the study. Dozens of other studies have shown that smart people normally live longer than their less intelligent peers.

“We wonder whether more skilled men were required at the front line, as warfare became more technical,” Dear says.

His team's study melds records from Scottish army units with results of national tests performed by all 11-year-olds in 1932. The tests assessed verbal reasoning, mathematics and spatial skills.

Strip the words away, and his and the Iraqi people’s cry of deep pain, anger and defiance would amount to no more than a shoe-throwing insult. But the words were heard. “This is the farewell kiss, you dog,” he shouted as he threw the first shoe. The crucial line followed the second shoe: “This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq .” Once those words were heard, the impact of a pair of shoes became electrifying. A young journalist has put aside the demands of his profession, preferring to act as the loudest cry of his long-suffering people. If one considers the torture and killings in Iraqi and US jails that Muntadhar often mentioned in his reports for al-Baghdadia satellite TV station, he was certainly aware he risked being badly hurt. As the Iraqi and Arab satellite stations switched from the live press conference to reporting reaction to the event, the stunned presenters and reporters were swept away by popular expressions of joy in the streets, from Baghdad to Gaza to Casablanca.

more from The Guardian here.

Being Mary Beard is a difficult balancing act. On the one side is the unrepentant scholar, trained in Latin epigraphy in the rigorous school of Joyce Reynolds, passionately determined to get things exactly right, ready to weigh probabilities judiciously, and thoroughly informed about the contents of the latest Dutch festschrift. On the other is the ardent blogger, and the writer (and TLS Classics editor) determined to communicate with audiences larger than a Roman historian or archaeologist can normally reach. Pompeii: The life of a Roman town combines these two personae, often triumphantly, sometimes a little uneasily. Beard’s knowledge of what has been written about Pompeii – a huge amount – is encyclopedic and up-to-the-minute. She knows, for example, who has argued (in a Dutch festschrift) that the wall painting which shows a man on horseback labelled “Spartaks” is not after all Spartacus with his name in Oscan, as some of us had fondly imagined and as I still believe.

more from the TLS here.

///
Evaluate
Idries Shah

Always evaluate evidence critically,
said a wise man of the Land of Fools.

I shall test you on feasibilty.

What if I were to say: Climb that moonbeam,
what would you answer?

I would say, I might slip on the way up.

Wrong! You should have thought of
chopping footholds with an axe.

From: The Magic Monastery
.

From The Telegraph:

Gwarlingo: Welsh description of the sound of a grandfather clock before it strikes.

Pisan zapra: Malay for the time needed to eat a banana.

Layogenic: Filipino for someone good-looking from afar but ugly up close.

Mouton enragé : French for someone calm who loses their temper – literally, “an enraged sheep”.

Kati-kehari: Hindi meaning to have the waist of an elegant lion.

Yupienalle: Swedish for a mobile phone – literally, “yuppie teddy” like a security blanket.

Ikibari: Japanese, a “lively needle” and describing a man who is willing but under-endowed.

Tantenverführer: German for a young man with suspiciously good manners.

Fensterln: German for climbing through a window to avoid someone's parents so you can have sex without them knowing.

Stroitel: Russian for a man who likes to have sex with two women at the same time.

Okuri-okami: Japanese for a man who feigns thoughtfulness by offering to see a girl home only to try to molest her once he gets in the door – literally, a “see-you-home wolf”

Trennungsagentur: German for someone hired by a woman to tell her boyfriend he has been dumped.

Picture: Chantepleurer: French for singing at the same time as crying, exactly what these North Korean children are doing as they sing 'Kim Il Sung we want to see you one more time'

More here.