From The Guardian:

Katie Price, eat your heart out. The real celebrity of last week’s Frankfurt Book fair was the Nobel laureate, Günter Grass. He was doing the rounds last week to talk about his new book, Die Box, another voyage into autobiography following 2006’s Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (Peeling the Onion). And the 81-year-old author (October 16 was his birthday) was swamped, buried in the attention. Photographers swarmed, fans were tearful to have met him, his publishers, gathered from around the world, were starstruck. Cosily dressed in a brown corduroy suit, nattily matched with a brown jumper, Grass took it all in his stride, happy to fit in a 10-minute chat if he could do it while puffing on his pipe. We headed outside so he could smoke; by the time we made it out of the hall, I had been elbowed and shoved aside by the human train which followed him all over the fair. He chuckled and found a space in which to conduct the interview, done under the eyes of a circle of fans, a couple of ready-to-pounce photographers and his publicist, who helped out when he couldn’t quite express what he was trying to say in his extremely impressive English.

He was good-natured about the attention, but relieved it was almost over. “I only come when I have a reason, and I’m only here for two days, which is enough.” His reason was the recent publication of Die Box, out in August in Germany but not due in English until at least the end of next year. In it Grass takes up the story of his life from where he left it at the end of Peeling the Onion, beginning with the publication of The Tin Drum at the age of 31, which catapulted him to the forefront of European fiction.

More here.

Johann Hari in Slate:

Every day, you handle the deadliest substance on earth. It is a weapon of mass destruction festering beneath your fingernails. In the past 10 years, it has killed more people than all the wars since Adolf Hitler rolled into one; in the next four hours, it will kill the equivalent of two jumbo jets full of kids. It is not anthrax or plutonium or uranium. Its name is shit—and we are in the middle of a shit storm. In the West, our ways of discreetly whisking this weapon away are in danger of breaking down, and one-quarter of humanity hasn’t ever used a functioning toilet yet.

The story of civilization has been the story of separating you from your waste. British investigative journalist Rose George’s stunning—and nauseating—new book opens by explaining that a single gram of feces can contain “ten million viruses, one million bacteria, one thousand parasite cysts, and one hundred worm eggs.” Accidentally ingesting this cocktail causes 80 percent of all the sickness on earth.

More here.

Michael M. Hughes in AlterNet:

The space resembles a clean, warm, but decidedly offbeat living room. The lighting is spare and soft, emanating from two lamps. A bookshelf holds a variety of picture books and well-known spiritual and psychological classics like Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams and The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James. Above the books sits a wooden sculpture of Psilocybe mushrooms. Behind the couch are a Mesoamerican mushroom stone replica and a statue of a serene, seated Buddha. An eye-popping abstract expressionist painting hangs on the wall, an explosion of color and intersecting lines.

This isn’t a metaphysical retreat center in San Francisco, or the Manhattan office of a New Age therapist-cum-shaman. Lundahl’s first psychedelic experience is taking place in the heart of the Behavioral Biology Research Center building at the Johns Hopkins Bayview campus in Southeast Baltimore, in a room affectionately referred to by both the scientists and the volunteers as the “psilocybin room.” She’s taking part in the first study of its kind since the early ’70s — a rigorous, scientific attempt to determine if drugs like psilocybin and LSD, demonized and driven underground for more than three decades, can facilitate life-changing, transformative mystical experiences.

More here.

Rama Lakshmi in the Washington Post:

In a training session at a suburban call center, groups of fresh-faced Indian recruits jettison their Indian names and thick accents and practice speaking English just like the Americans do. They have hesitant conversations with imaginary American customers who complain angrily about their broken appliance or computer glitch.

The instructor writes “35 = 10” on the board, as though he is gifting the recruits with a magic mantra.

“A 35-year-old American’s brain and IQ is the same as a 10-year-old Indian’s,” he explains, and urges the agents to be patient with the callers.

That is a scene from “Hello,” the first Bollywood movie about the distorted and dual lives of India’s 2 million call-center workers. When it debuted this month, many in the audience cheered and laughed at such scenes, which pandered to the reigning stereotypes about those on both ends of the transcontinental, toll-free helpline — the dumb American customer and the smart, but fake, Indian call-center agent.

More here.

Pedro Meyer. Plantation El Centro. California. 1987-1995.

More on this master Mexican photographer here, here, and here.

The T2F gallery in Karachi has an upcoming show of Pedro Meyer’s Heresies Project.

Secret Society played 3QD’s second annual ball and were amazing.  Lindsay updates us on what’s been happening with them.

Secret Society fans will be excited to learn that the band is poised to record its first studio album, Infernal Machines, in mid-December.

You can download live recordings of the 18-piece steampunk jazz ensemble here, for free. It’s all original material, composed by my partner, DJA, and performed by some of the most talented young jazz musicians in New York.

SecSoc is doing a fall fund drive to defray recording costs. If you’d like to contribute, please click here.

John Kadvany reviews Alain Baidou’s book in Notre Dame Philosphical Reviews (via bookforum):

Like many philosophers, Alain Badiou relies on technical systems of mathematical logic as a foundation for philosophical exploration. Donald Davidson used Tarski’s theory of truth for formal languages to ground his approach to natural language semantics. Modal logic is frequently used to discuss problems of necessity, time, or belief. W. V. O. Quine made the reduction of mathematics to set theory a paradigm of “ontological commitment,” such that an idealized formalization of physical science identified the entities needed to ensure the theory as fundamentally “real.” Indeed, Badiou’s project is exactly in this Quinean mode, with set theory his preferred tool. While Badiou’s set-theoretic interpretations are not typical of those found in Berkeley or Princeton, the overall strategy is nonetheless “analytic.” Hence one’s response to Number and Numbers, and a similar earlier book, Being and Event, will depend on a) the philosophical narrative laid over the mathematics, and b) the treatment of the mathematics vis à vis the interpretation.

This review follows those two themes. But first a word on intellectual context. Badiou is one of several French philosophers pilloried by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont in Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science (1998). Sokal, of course, authored the sham 1996 Social Text article, concocted as a meaningless essay in high lit-crit-theoretic style, and buttressed by facile, often bogus or inconsistent, appeals to quantum physics or relativity, all undetected by the editors. The hoax was widely reported in the popular press and Sokal has since continued his manic crusade, though with much less panache and success. One of Sokal’s “tests” for intellectual value is whether one can detect a difference in meaning if key words are interchanged, say “being” and “other,” or “mediation” and “reification,” or whatever — sort of a Turing test for intellectual quality. For Badiou in Fashionable Nonsense, Sokal and Bricmont, as they so often do, just selectively quote him, rhetorically ask the reader if it makes sense (of course not, devoid of context), and then go on. The second trick could be applied to Number and Numbers, perhaps with some honesty, but I think ultimately unfairly, as explained below. Badiou’s ontological narrative is allusive, poetic, and deeply metaphorically inspired by his understanding of modern set theory. And Sokal’s “reversal” test also fails. Badiou’s vision is a wholly consistent one, built indeed from a stimulating historical account of the treatment of number by Gottlob Frege, Guiseppe Peano, Richard Dedekind, and Georg Cantor.

Ammon Shea in The Guardian:

I find myself subject to the entire range of emotions and reactions that a great book will call forth from its reader. I chuckle, laugh out loud, smile wistfully, cringe, widen my eyes in surprise, and even feel sadness—all from the neatly ordered rows of words and their explanations. All of the human emotions and experiences are right there in this dictionary, just as they would be in any fine work of literature. They just happen to be alphabetised.

I keep paper and pen by my chair so that I can write down the things in the dictionary that I find interesting. After the first hour I realize that I’ve been writing down far too much, and that if I continue taking notes at this rate I’ll never finish reading. But there is just so much in the dictionary that I wish were in my head, and I read with the constant knowledge that I’m passing by things that later I’ll want to know. The answers to questions that I’ve had for years and the answers to questions that I never knew I had are coming up constantly.

These are some of the pleasures of reading the dictionary, and they are indeed sublime. The frustrations are considerably more pedestrian. After the first three hours of reading I have the kind of headache that makes life feel unfair. It is a pounding that keeps pace with my heartbeat, as though I had a second heart, located in the lower-left back part of my head, the sole purpose of which is to pump tiny spasms of pain, rather than blood.

Amitava Kumar in The Boston Review

I was anxious about my response to The White Tiger. No, not only for the suspicion about the ressentiment lurking in my breast, but also because I was aware that I might be open to the same charge of being inauthentic. My own novel Home Products, published last year, has as its protagonist a journalist who is writing about the murder of a young woman. The case is based on a well-known murder of a poet who had an illicit relationship with a married politician. Kidnapping and rape and, of course, murder, feature quite frequently in the novel’s pages. By presenting these events through a journalist’s eye, I tried hard to maintain a tone of observational integrity. At some level, realism had become my religion.

Since then, I have wondered whether my choice of the journalist as a protagonist is not itself a symptom of an anxiety about authenticity. Was it the worry of an expatriate Indian, concerned about losing touch with the society he took as his subject? To invest in an aesthetic of observation and reportage was to build banks against the rising tide of that worry. I know now that this worry informs my reading of all novels about India.

For years, in the wake of Rushdie, I imagined magical realism to be the last refuge of the nonresident Indian. If you were dealing in invented details, it hardly mattered when you mixed up names and dates. But now, more than magical realism, it is the painstaking attempt at verisimilitude that clearly betrays the anxiety about authenticity. This condition is more subtle. It has limited fiction’s reach, keeping writers to what they know.

A few days ago, a friend whom I love dearly and always find to have attractive ideas asked me, “What do you think is the most difficult cause in our artistic endeavours?” I was first caught unawares and answered, with a slackness of thought, “Never mind! All causes are difficult. If they weren’t, we wouldn’t have called them by the name of cause. The fact that we separate them from other problems is also self-explanatory.” My friend knows me a little. He realised that I was, as my students sometimes like to say, letting go of it. It was the truth.

He had come to me early in the morning and taken me to the Yildiz Park. We were walking underneath a sweet blue sky that refuted all we knew about the winter season. Barren trees resembling imaginary palisades rather than tarnished silver, vibrant green cypresses and pines booming forward like deep cello tunes amidst the silence, and the deep blue, sparkling sea that beckoned us to climates unknown had suddenly fascinated me. But my friend wouldn’t leave me alone. Maybe he had an inherent ability to take on two tasks at once with the same vigour.

more from Eurozine here.

Obama Runs Constructive Criticism Ad Against McCain

more from The Onion here.

We cannot see farther into the universe because the big bang happened only 14 billion years ago and light from distant regions has not had enough time to reach Earth. Yet subtle clues are beginning to reveal some of the properties of the regions of space hidden beyond our cosmic horizon. Our world appears to be only a small part of a “multiverse,” an expanse vastly larger than the visible universe, and for the most part completely different from it.

To account for what we do see, cosmologists invented a theory many years ago called “inflation,” in which a brief, ultra-accelerated expansion of the early universe stretched space to a size far greater than what we observe. Inflation explains why, despite the violence of the big bang, the universe appears to us uniform and smooth, and the theory has made predictions confirmed by measurements of subtle variations in the radiation left over from the big bang. But inflation does not really make the universe more uniform — just huge. If inflation is correct, then the billions of light-years that our telescopes probe are a mere dot on a far vaster canvas.

more from Seed here.

///
From the Air
Laurie Anderson

Good evening. This is your Captain.
We are about to attempt a crash landing.
Please extinguish all cigarettes.
Place your tray tables in their
upright, locked position.
Your Captain says: Put your head on your knees.
Your Captain says: Put your head in your hands.
Put your hands on your hips. Heh heh.
This is your Captain–and we are going down.
We are all going down, together.
And I said: Uh oh. This is gonna be some day.
Standby. This is the time.
And this is the record of the time.
This is the time. And this is the record of the time.

Uh–this is your Captain again.
You know, I’ve got a funny feeling I’ve seen this all before.
Why? Cause I’m a caveman.
Why? Cause I’ve got eyes in the back of my head.
Why? It’s the heat. Standby.
This is the time. And this is the record of the time.
This is the time. And this is the record of the time.

Put your hands over your eyes. Jump out of the plane.
There is no pilot. You are not alone. Standby.
This is the time. And this is the record of the time.
This is the time. And this is the record of the time.

From Big Science, 1982
///

From The Nation:

Eugene Luther Gore Vidal Jr. has always enjoyed a healthy appreciation of his own, indeed remarkable, wit and talent. So have most other people, though approbation of his moral character has perhaps been less close to universal. His successes–bestselling novels, Broadway plays, screenplays, two enchanting memoirs and five decades of scintillating literary and political criticism–would be tedious to chronicle (and superfluous in the Age of Wikigooglespace). But what do they add up to? Is he famous for some more enduring reason than… being famous?

He grew up in the penumbra of fame. His maternal grandfather, T.P. Gore, was more or less heroic: blind, Oklahoma’s first senator and a friend of Bryan and Darrow, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. His father, Gene Vidal, was an All-American football player, World War I aviator, friend of Lindbergh and Earhart and founder of TWA. His mother later married that socialite of socialites Hugh Auchincloss, who would later become Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy’s stepfather as well. In the vast attic of his grandparents’ house in Rock Creek Park were thousands of books. Up there and downstairs, reading to his grandfather, he acquired an education. At school–he attended St. Alban’s, like his younger cousin Albert Arnold Gore–he picked up Latin and fell in love with a godlike fellow student, who died a few years later, young and still perfect, on Iwo Jima. As told in Vidal’s memoir Palimpsest, it is one of the most stirring love stories in recent literature.

More here.

From Science:

Astronomers taking a second look at a distant galaxy have found it is actually a pair of colliding galaxies, each harboring a supermassive black hole at its center. The existence of the black holes, which were fully formed less than 2 billion years after the big bang, suggests that these giant objects could have been common in the early universe. If so, they must have had a bigger impact on the evolution of galaxies than previously thought, and they might have influenced the origin of life on distant planets.

Ever since the first black hole, Cygnus X-1, was discovered, astronomers have been adding to the rolls of these strange cosmic objects, whose tremendous gravity can capture even light. The heavyweights of the group are supermassive black holes, which cram masses equaling a million suns or more into a space much smaller than our solar system. These monsters are supposed to take billions of years to form, because they accumulate all matter or objects unfortunate enough to pass too close–including other black holes. Supermassive black holes not only shape their host galaxy but also can determine its potential habitability, depending on whether they form quietly or flood the vicinity with lethal radiation and destructive jets of ionized gas.

More here.

This is a truly amazing story in the world of sport. As I’ve written here before, I once had the chance to play one game of squash with Gogi Alauddin in Lahore, who was rated #2 in the world at the time. He told me we would play a long game to 21 points. If I scored a single point, he would buy me dinner. Predictably (in retrospect), I lost 21-0 in the worst drubbing of my life. He barely had to move to completely crush me in every point. And yes, I had to buy dinner as well.

Faisal Irfan Mian at All Things Pakistan:

The small village of Nawakille (pop. few thousand) outside the frontier city of Peshawar in Pakistan boasts something that no other in the world can. Over the last half century, the village that does not have a single squash court, has produced six world number ones in the sport. In fact, since 1950 the six between them have won 29 British Opens (the Wimbledon of squash) and 14 World Opens (which started only in 1975).

This is an incredible story that just happens to be a sport story. If the sport of squash had a bigger profile in world sport, there would have been movies made on this subject. For now, a writeup in this blog will have to suffice. While the British whiled away their time guarding the Khyber pass, they decided to relieve their boredom by building a few outdoors roofless squash courts. In the heat and direct sunlight, it was difficult to play a game with one of the highest cardiovascular work rates. But try telling that to the Pathan warriors.

Hashim Khan, the first of the lot, become a ball-boy at the Peshawar British Army Officers club and practiced with the broken balls tossed out by the officers. When the officers would retreat indoors in the 100 degrees heat and the squash court was empty, it would be “Hashim vs Hashim” in the court according to his biography. He got good enough to be the Pakistan champion by 1949 and somehow got enough sponsorship to get to the British Open in 1951. He was 34 years old at the time (Borg retired from Tennis at 26). In the warm up tournament he beat the four time British Open champion Mahmoud El Karim conceding just six points. The British press called it a “flash in the pan”, expecting for order to be restored, but Hashim went on to beat Mahmoud in the Open final 9-5, 9-0, 9-0, and then continued to win the tournament six out of the next seven years.

More here.  [Photo shows Jansher Khan and Jahangir Khan.]

Bonus video:

Describing how ideology, special-interest pressure, populist politics, and sheer incompetence have left the U.S. economy on life support, the author puts forth a clear, commonsense plan to reverse the Bush-era follies and regain America’s economic sanity.

Joseph E. Stiglitz in Vanity Fair:

 

We are in the midst of micro-economic failure on a grand scale. Financial markets receive generous compensation—in the form of more than 30 percent of all corporate profits—presumably for performing two critical tasks: allocating savings and managing risk. But the financial markets have failed laughably at both. Hundreds of billions of dollars were allocated to home loans beyond Americans’ ability to pay. And rather than managing risk, the financial markets created more risk. The failure of our financial system to do what it is supposed to do matches in destructive grandeur the macro-economic failures of the Great Depression.

Economic theory—and historical experience—long ago proved the need for regulation of financial markets. But ever since the Reagan presidency, deregulation has been the prevailing religion. Never mind that the few times “free banking” has been tried—most recently in Pinochet’s Chile, under the influence of the doctrinaire free-market theorist Milton Friedman—the experiment has ended in disaster. Chile is still paying back the debts from its misadventure. With massive problems in 1987 (remember Black Friday, when stock markets plunged almost 25 percent), 1989 (the savings-and-loan debacle), 1997 (the East Asia financial crisis), 1998 (the bailout of Long Term Capital Management), and 2001–02 (the collapses of Enron and WorldCom), one might think there would be more skepticism about the wisdom of leaving markets to themselves.

More here.