Thomas McGuane’s recent book of stories, Gallatin Canyon (2006), compels a look back over nearly forty years of work. McGuane has steadily produced novels, stories and screenplays, and essays on sports and pastimes like fishing and horseback riding. He has been quietly influential and subtly subversive.[1] Coursing through his work is a current of strident silliness—funny names, wacky characters, outsize occurrences—that flows from Mark Twain, picks up Ring Lardner and others early in the twentieth century, and adds Joseph Heller and Thomas Pynchon, post–World War II.

In spite of this, McGuane is hard to place. The humor is evident from the start, but there is something stylishly askew. The early novels The Sporting Club (1969), The Bushwhacked Piano (1971), and Ninety-two in the Shade (1973), while full of oddballs in slapstick situations, also feature formalities of diction and syntactical quirks (“Stanton beckoned”; “Little comfort derived from the slumberous heat of the day”) that seem plucked from the Victorians. The Sporting Club’s protagonist even puts himself to sleep reading Thackeray.

more from The Believer here.

From Nature:

A genetic survey of more than 34,000 people has revealed the first gene known to have a decisive effect on height in people of average stature. A change to just a single letter of genetic code is linked to a height boost of almost a centimetre in a healthy person, all other things being equal. Although up to 90% of variation in people’s height is thought to be down to genetics, identifying the genes involved is difficult because there are thought to be hundreds of them, each with an almost imperceptible effect.

Researchers therefore combed through almost the entire genome of nearly 5,000 volunteers in search of tiny changes, called polymorphisms, that correspond to variations in height. Eventually they found a single-letter DNA substitution, buried in a gene called HMGA2, that influences height. People with two copies of the ‘tall’ variant of HMGA2 are, on average, almost a centimetre taller than those with two copies of the ‘short’ version. Those with one copy of each are somewhere in the middle.

More here.

From The New York Times:

The race to decode the human genome may not be entirely over: the loser has come up with a new approach that may let him prevail in the end. In 2003, a government-financed consortium of academic centers announced it had completed the human genome, fending off a determined challenge from the biologist J. Craig Venter. The consortium’s genome comprised just half the DNA contained in a normal cell, and the DNA used in the project came from a group of people from different racial and ethnic backgrounds. But the loser in the race, Dr. Venter, could still have the last word. In a paper published today, his research team is announcing that it has decoded a new version of the human genome that some experts believe may be better than the consortium’s.

Called a full, or diploid genome, it consists of the DNA in both sets of chromosomes, one from each parent, and it is the normal genome possessed by almost all the body’s cells. And the genome the team has decoded belongs to just one person: Dr. Venter.

More here.

JoAnn Verburg. Untitled. 1983.

More here and here.

Current show at MoMA. Review in The New Yorker here.

Will Li in The Situationist:

“Some acted selflessly … though that meant they risked infection themselves.

Others fled infected cities in an attempt to save themselves.

And some who were sick made it their mission to deliberately infect others.” BBC News.

Ebola? Influenza? The movie “28 Days Later?” . . . or “Corrupted Blood” Disease in World of Warcraft?

In September of 2005, Blizzard Entertainment added a dungeon to their extremely popular MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) World of Warcraft (WoW). This dungeon featured an enemy at the end who, when killed, could infect players with a curse which could instantly kill weaker characters and eventually kill stronger ones. But, as reported in another BBC News report, rather than being confined to those playing in the dungeon, the disease inadvertently spread, passing from player to player, carried by computer programmed characters (non-player characters or NPCs), even manifesting on several game servers.

Ultimately, it killed thousands of player characters (temporarily) and led to “reports from the disaster zones with some describing seeing “hundreds” of bodies lying in the virtual streets of the online towns and cities.”

The very human reactions of individuals confronted with “Corrupted Blood” disease has since prompted researchers at the Tufts University School of Medicine to look into the virtual disease (and possible others) as disease models which could lend insight into human behavior. The August 21, 2007 BBC News article is excerpted below.

* * *

Researcher Professor Nina Fefferman, from Tufts University School of Medicine, said: “Human behaviour has a big impact on disease spread. And virtual worlds offer an excellent platform for studying human behaviour.

John B. Judis in The New Republic:

Bush carried West Virginia and won the election partly because he ran a better campaign than John Kerry. But that wasn’t the only reason. There was something odd about the support for Bush in places like West Virginia. Unlike voters in New York City, voters in Martinsburg had little to fear from terrorist attacks; yet they backed Bush, while New Yorkers voted for Kerry. If gay marriage were legalized, Martinsburg would be unlikely to host massive numbers of same-sex weddings; yet voters I talked to were haunted by the specter of gay marriage.

Some pundits have tried to explain away this mystery by arguing that Bush backers voted for their values rather than their interests. But this explanation is unsatisfying, since many of those voters didn’t opt for “family values” in 1992 and 1996, when the country elected a well-known philanderer as president.

In fact, many political scientists can’t begin to explain what took place in West Virginia in 2004. In recent years, the field has become dominated by rational choice theorists, who have tried to develop complex mathematical equations to predict voting behavior. These equations rest on a view of voters as calculating consumers choosing a product on the basis of relative cost and utility–a view that generally leaves little room for the possibility of voters acting irrationally.

There is, however, one group of scholars–members of the relatively new field of political psychology–who are trying to explain voter preferences that can’t be easily quantified.

[H/t: Gabriel Cohen.] Here you can find my musings about this dynamic.

In The Age (via Political Theory Daily Review):

DID an extraterrestrial impact set off a catastrophic chain of events that led indirectly to the dawn of agriculture in the Middle East nearly 13,000 years ago?

It may sound like something out of a Hollywood science fiction movie, combining the global disaster themes of Deep Impact and The Day After Tomorrow. Yet the evidence looks increasingly solid.

There is little doubt that a megaflood of glacial meltwater cascading off the North American continent into the Atlantic Ocean spurred the birth of agriculture and civilisation in the Middle East around 12,900 years ago. What was not known until recently is that this event, known as the Agassiz megaflood, may have been triggered by a comet exploding above or plunging into the ice sheet north of the modern Great Lakes.

According to two geologists at the University of Oregon, Dr Douglas Kennett and Dr Jon Erlandson, there is reason to believe a large chunk of a comet exploded above or crashed directly into the Laurentide ice sheet, rupturing the ice dams on the easterly margin of Lake Agassiz and causing frigid water to flood into the North Atlantic.

The primary evidence consists of a carbon-rich layer of soil, dating to around 13,000 years ago, found at 50 Clovis-age sites across North America. The Clovis people, the first wave of human colonists to reach North America from Siberia, had only recently colonised the Americas.

F THE VENICE BIENNALE is still a treasure trove of trends for early adapters, look for cutting-edge art and fashion this year to feature . . . Harry Truman. Two artists as different as Francis Alÿs and Louise Bourgeois—Alÿs in a video that samples a Truman speech, Bourgeois in a series of blue marker drawings called Untitled (Harry Truman), 2005—refer to the little haberdasher, hardly the kind of figure usually called upon to electrify an artistic experience. Why Harry Truman? Why now?

more from artforum here.

The rioting in Budapest in October 2006 following Ferenc Gyurscány’s “lying speech” woke up the outside world to the existence of deep divisions in Hungarian society. At first, the international press was only to happy to see the “parallel” between the demonstrations and the 1956 revolution, a version of events put forward by the demonstrators themselves. Later, when it emerged that many belonged to the far-Right, there was a shrill cry of disapproval, then attention moved elsewhere. But a new controversy around a monument to the ’56 revolution shows that political antagonism in Hungary, played out via historical symbols, shows no sign of abating. If commentators in Hungary are talking about a “civil war mentality” in the country, then that is something Europe needs to understand better. Eurozine asks Hungarian journalists, authors, and publishers how it has come to this.

more from Eurozine here.

Clad in milquetoast shirtsleeves, combat-style Bermudas, and the unshowered film of day-old hangovers, the young men go about their Hollywood business with the same haughty unconcern that pervades their overslept lives. These are the new crusaders of cool. They are perpetually late to meet with representation, to accept graft, to sign hedge-fund-sized checks, and to slip into bed with stargazing young actresses. They are late to everything except success, their laissez-faire nonchalance a testament to the fuck-off patois of a generation. These insolent pop pilgrims provide a window into the machismo-fueled fantasy world of meteoric laziness. They are a scruffy gaggle of would-be pizza boys reluctantly poised to plant their half-finished Betsy Ross into the terra firma of the aught decade.

more from McSweeney’s here.

From The London Times:

Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy was considered by T. S. Eliot to be “the highest point that poetry has ever reached or ever can reach”. While in his A Defence of Poetry Shelley declared: “Dante was the first awakener of entranced Europe; he created a language in itself music and persuasion out of chaos of inharmonious barbarisms . . . he presided over the resurrection of learning.”

But such plaudits were not always forthcoming. For years Dante was largely unknown to English audiences. Certainly there are references to him in Chaucer, who had learnt of “the greate poete of Ytallie” on diplomatic missions to Italy in the 1370s. But English readers did not have much stomach for his ghastly tales of journeys through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. “Good sire, namoor of this!” cried Chaucer’s knight after the monk had shared some of Dante’s more gut-churning travails with his fellow pilgrims. So for the next 400 years Dante was hardly known except by the few who saw his fresco in the Duomo in Florence while travelling Europe.

How, then, did this 14th-century Florentine poet come to have such an influence on later generations of artists and poets, particularly the Romantics and the PreRaphaelites?

More here.  Note: This post is dedicated to my daughter Sheherzad Raza Preisler who memorized the entire 146 lines of the XXXIII Canto from Dante’s Paradiso when she was not quite 9 years old.

Haider Rizvi at OneWorld:

NEW YORK, Aug 31 (OneWorld) – It is one of the most affluent countries in the world, but sill millions of people in the United States find it very difficult to put a nice meal on their dinner table. Nationwide, more than 36 million people, or nearly 13 percent of the total population, lived in poverty last year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau report released this week.
Among those officially considered “poor,” over one third are children, most of them non-white minorities such as African Americans, Latinos, and Asians.

The data reveals continued inequality and concentration of wealth in the United States, with the top 20 percent of households receiving over 50 percent of the nation’s income, while the lowest 20 percent got just a little over 3 percent.

“The impact of race, ethnicity, and gender is extremely disturbing,” notes Roberta Spivek of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a Quaker organization involved in numerous campaigns for economic and social rights.

According to the data, more than 8 percent of non-Hispanic whites, about 10 percent of Asians, over 20 percent of Hispanics, and some 24 percent of African Americans are “poor.”

Although the Hispanic poverty rate went down by about 1 percent last year, African Americans and non-White Hispanics are still about three times more likely than whites to be poor.

Single mothers figure among the nation’s poor who suffer the most. “Being a single mother has an alarming effect,” Spivek noted, reflecting on the gender-specific aspect of the numbers.

More here.

Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker:

Twelve-thirty on a beautiful summer day, and the chicken committee Garden of Happinessof the City Chicken Project is meeting at the Garden of Happiness, in the Crotona neighborhood of the Bronx. The chicken committee is devoted to the proliferation of egg-laying chickens in the outer boroughs, giving hens to people and having them raise the birds in community gardens and eat and even sell the eggs (“passing on the gift,” as this is called in the project), and thereby gain experience of chicken, eggs, and community—or fowl, food, and fellowship, as one of the more alliterative-minded organizers has said. It is the pet program of Just Food, a small organization that is administered by a startlingly young-looking woman named Jacquie Berger, who is silently monitoring the proceedings.

The Garden of Happiness is a sunny community garden with vegetable plots, a chicken coop, a corrugated-tin shed, and a few chairs beneath a grape arbor, where the chicken committee is meeting. The chicken committee is a lot more committee than chicken, its deliberations filled with references to “existing chicken situations” and “pursuit of newer egg opportunities,” and the slightly skeptical neighborhood people have to be gently won over by the carefully beaming professionals. They provide the nudging, let’s-get-back-on-track counsel that chicken-caring community organizers have to give potentially disorganized community chicken-carers.

More here.

Michael Shermer in Scientific American:

Among many metrics available to track the skeptical movement is the ascension of four books to the august heights of the New York Times best-seller list—Sam Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation (Knopf, 2006), Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell (Viking, 2006), Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great (Hachette Book Group, 2007) and Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion (Houghton Mifflin, 2006)—that together, in Dawkins’s always poignant prose, “raise consciousness to the fact that to be an atheist is a realistic aspiration, and a brave and splendid one. You can be an atheist who is happy, balanced, moral and intellectually fulfilled.” Amen, brother. I suggest that we raise our consciousness one tier higher for the following reasons.

Positive assertions are necessary. Champion science and reason, as Charles Darwin suggested: “It appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against Christianity & theism produce hardly any effect on the public; & freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds which follow[s] from the advance of science. It has, therefore, been always my object to avoid writing on religion, & I have confined myself to science.”

More here.

From the Royal Academy of Arts magazine:

On Good Friday this year, in the company of a small group of travellers, I went to visit a warehouse on an industrial estate in Bridlington, East Yorkshire. The object of our pilgrimage was not this nondescript structure but the painting that it briefly sheltered. There, on the far wall, hung the largest picture that David Hockney RA has ever created – perhaps the most sizeable ever to be painted in the open air. This was a first for the artist, who had never before seen his entire work assembled together.

The subject of the Big Picture is one of several spots in the landscape west of Bridlington where he has been working. It consists principally of an immense net of interconnecting twigs and branches. That is what Hockney was gazing at so hard, as he contends it is only by looking very long and hard that you begin to understand what you are seeing. ‘A picture this size just has to be of certain kinds of subject. Nature is one, because there is an infinity there that we all feel.’

More here.

It is said that in his latter years A L Rowse used to enter the Common Room at All Souls with the self-trumpeting assertion, ‘You’re all fools, and I am not.’ Like Rowse, Germaine Greer was a first-class Elizabethan scholar in her youth. But in this bold ‘late’ study she adopts an alarmingly similar tone. Rowse himself is excoriated for having ‘the temerity to exercise his imagination’, even though this is something that Greer has the temerity to do at all times. Scattergun assaults on shadow-squadrons of other scholars – sometimes named (‘the likes of Anthony Holden’, ‘Burgess and most of his ilk’, ‘Greenblatt and his ilk’) and sometimes unnamed (‘bachelor dons’, ‘those nineteenth-century schoolmasters’, ‘the Shakespeare wallahs’) – explode violently like Tourette tics. At times Greer seems almost to wallow in her own spleen.

more from Literary Review here.

I’ve been sitting at the dinner table in Jack Mapanje’s lounge for more than an hour. The mug of tea his wife brought in is cold, the plate of biscuits half gone, but my list of questions is growing rather than shrinking. I explain that we’ll have to stop for a moment while I change over the tape recorder, and the exiled Malawian poet throws his head back and lets out a booming laugh. “It’s very boring to answer yes or no,” he says.

There’s been little as straightforward as that so far today. A conversation with Mapanje loops around like one of the poems from his Forward-prize-nominated collection, Beasts of Nalunga, full of colourful stories, brisk changes of tone, and laughter. Every now and then he picks up a book from the table in front of him to refer back to one of his poems. “I think I put it better here,” he says, peering through glasses perched on the end of his nose as he searches for the required passage.

more from The Guardian here.

My zealously churlish response: At the acme of his celebrity, I thought Kerouac a purveyor of frenzied fakery, of pseudo-mystical junk; and I do not depart now from the intelligent judgment of my youth. Nowadays, “On the Road” can perhaps count as a document of a sentimental overwrought underdone subliterate zonked-out shamanistic onanistic fool-ridden era, when saccharine blockheads posed as transcendent Blake-heads, when stupor was mistaken for Buddha . . . . but what the hell, let it count for any old thing! — as long as you don’t call it literature.

— Cynthia Ozick

more from The LA Times here.

From Science:

There’s no news like bad news. The tabloids are full of accidents, gory murders, and mayhem, and people eat it up. But there may be a silver lining, at least for seniors. A new study finds that the human brain reacts less strongly to emotionally negative stimuli as we age, in effect making us more responsive to all things positive and less responsive to the dark and dismal. This bolsters a growing body of evidence showing that aging changes how the brain reacts to emotional stimuli.

Much of the media exploits what psychologists call the “negativity bias”: our tendency to pay more attention to the bad than to the good. This bias plays a role in a wide range of cognitive areas, making a headline about a murder more attention grabbing than one about a marriage, for example. However, in recent years, research has revealed that as we get older our emotional responses to the world around us become more positive and that the stereotype of the “grumpy old man” may actually be a myth. A number of studies have found that older people typically report a higher sense of well-being than younger people.

More here.

Jim Lewis in The New York Times:

Good morning and please listen to me: Denis Johnson is a true American artist, and “Tree of Smoke” is a tremendous book, a strange entertainment, very long but very fast, a great whirly ride that starts out sad and gets sadder and sadder, loops unpredictably out and around, and then lurches down so suddenly at the very end that it will make your stomach flop.

“Tree of Smoke” doesn’t feel like a Denis Johnson novel, not at first, anyway. He has a fondness for the oracular mode, and he often pitches his rhetoric in a register unavailable to most contemporary writers: Isaiah among the lumpenproletariat. It’s his natural form of address, but it can sometimes be exhausting. An earlier novel, “Already Dead” (1997), started out wild and ended, 435 pages later, unhinged. “Tree of Smoke” is cannier: it begins like a very good novel by someone else, and by the time you realize how demanding it has become, it’s too late.

Sentences like this start flashing past: “She had nothing in this world but her two hands and her crazy love for Jesus, who seemed, for his part, never to have heard of her.” What a thing to say, but the book is moving on. Two drunken soldiers, one of them an amputee, have a long, inane conversation, during which the disabled one announces, “My invisible foot hurts.” Later, the other soldier weeps “like a barking dog.” The lines roll like billiard balls with weird English on them, they spin and skid, often just after their last comma, and then they plunge into their pockets with a crack.

More here.