Like most authors, Germaine de Staël and Benjamin Constant were naturally preoccupied with the possible impact of their work on posterity; yet neither of them ever imagined that their sentimental partnership might itself become an inspirational model for future generations. Unlike that other famous literary couple to whom they are often compared – Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir – they were not inclined to be smug about their association, idealizing it as the superior union of free spirits; on the contrary, they soon came to view their life together as an unmitigated disaster, one from which they made protracted, if unsuccessful, attempts to extricate themselves.

So what is it that makes de Staël and Constant so interesting as a couple? Contemporaries would have replied unhesitatingly that their genius for brilliant conversation shone most brightly when they were in each other’s company, that one could not claim to have known either of them, unless one had seen them performing together. This double-act dimension of the relationship is unfortunately lost for us, as are all but a few of the many letters they exchanged over the years. In a spirited “dual biography”, Renée Winegarten retraces the evolution of the partnership in an attempt to place it on firmer ground; unsurprisingly, perhaps, this comparative exercise brings to light more differences than similarities between the two protagonists.

more from the TLS here.

This Might Be Real
Sarah Manguso

How long in a cold room will the tea stay hot?
What about reality interests you?
How long can you live?
Were you there when I said this might be real?
How much do you love?
Sixty percent?
Things that are gone?
Do you love what’s real?
Is real a partial form?
Is it a nascent form?
What is it before it’s real?
Is it a switch that moves and then is ever still?
Is it a spectrum of cross-fades?
Is what’s next real?
When it comes will everything turn real?
If I drink enough tea to hallucinate, is that real?
If I know I’m waiting for someone but I don’t know who, is he real?
Is he real when he comes?
Is he real when he’s gone?
Is consequence what’s real?
Is consequence all that’s real?
What brings consequence?
Is it what’s real?
Is it what turned everything to disbelief, the last form love takes?

Natalie Angier in The New York Times

As anybody who has grieved inconsolably over the death of a loved one can attest, extended mourning is, in part, a perverse kind of optimism. Surely this bottomless, unwavering sorrow will amount to something, goes the tape loop. Surely if I keep it up long enough I’ll accomplish my goal, and the person will stop being dead. Last week the Internet and European news outlets were flooded with poignant photographs of Gana, an 11-year-old gorilla at the Münster Zoo in Germany, holding up the body of her dead baby, Claudio, and pursing her lips toward his lifeless fingers. Claudio died at the age of 3 months of an apparent heart defect, and for days Gana refused to surrender his corpse to zookeepers, a saga that provoked among her throngs of human onlookers admiration and compassion and murmurings that, you see? Gorillas, and probably a lot of other animals as well, have a grasp of their mortality and will grieve for the dead and are really just like us after all.

Nobody knows what emotions swept through Gana’s head and heart as she persisted in cradling and nuzzling the remains of her son. But primatologists do know this: Among nearly all species of apes and monkeys in the wild, a mother will react to the death of her infant as Gana did — by clutching the little decedent to her breast and treating it as though it were still alive. For days or even weeks afterward, she will take it with her everywhere and fight off anything that threatens to snatch it away.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Researchers are closing in on ironclad evidence for the black hole believed to lurk at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. Astronomers used a “virtual” telescope spanning more than 2,800 miles (4,500 km)  to  home in on Sagittarius A* (“A-star”), the light source believed to mark the location of a black hole four million times as massive as the sun. They were able to resolve Sagittarius A* to within 37 microarcseconds, the width of a baseball on the moon as seen from Earth. Based on the size of the light-emitting region, they believe it is offset from the exact location of the black hole, which pulls gas and dust into a disk swirling around it that gives off light.

Instead, they speculate that Sagittarius A*  is either high-speed gas on one side of the rotating accretion disk or a jet of matter being ejected from around the black hole. The case for a black hole was already “pretty solid,” says study author Shepherd Doeleman, an astrophysicist  at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Haystack Observatory. “We’re now able to get information that is really on the same size scale as where we think all the action is happening in the galactic black hole.” Prior observations of the presumed black hole were obscured by surrounding gas and dust that reflect longer wavelength radio waves.

More here.

Joan Acocella in The New Yorker:

In 1600, Rome’s Campo de’ Fiori, now a nice plaza lined with cafés, was one of the city’s execution grounds, and on Ash Wednesday of that year Giordano Bruno, a philosopher and former priest accused of heresy by the Inquisition, was taken there and burned. The event was carefully timed. AshWednesday is the primary day of Christian penance. As for the year, Pope Clement VIII chose it because 1600 was a jubilee for the Church—a festivity that would be enhanced by the execution of an important heretic. Bruno rode to the Campo on a mule, the traditional means of transport for people going to their death. (It was also a practical means. After years in the Inquisition’s prisons, many of the condemned could not walk.) Once he arrived and mounted the pyre, a crucifix was held up to his face. According to a witness, he turned away angrily. He could not speak; he had been gagged with a leather bridle. (Or, some say, an iron spike had been driven through his tongue.) He was tied to the stake, and the pyre was lit. When it had burned out, his remains were dumped into the Tiber. As Ingrid Rowland writes in “Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $27), the Church thereby made Bruno a martyr. But “a martyr to what?” she asks. That is the question that her book, the first full-scale biography of Bruno in English, tries, with difficulty, to answer.

More here.

Sinan Antoon in The Nation:

Mahmoud Darwish once said that he considered himself to be a Trojan poet recollecting and reconstructing the voices of the defeated: “The Trojans would have expressed a different narrative than that of Homer, but their voices are forever lost. I am in search of those voices.” Darwish conducted his search as he roamed over a “map of absence,” as he called his homeland of Palestine. On August 9 his odyssey ended when he died after complications from open heart surgery in Houston. Four days later, thousands of Palestinians flocked to Ramallah to bid him farewell at a state funeral, and countless others across the Arab world and elsewhere mourned his passing.

For nearly half a century, Darwish’s heart, and the heart of his poetry, had been public spaces. In the Arab world, it was not uncommon for Darwish readings to draw thousands of people; many thousands more bought his books and listened to his poems as they were set to music. But Darwish was more than a “Trojan poet”: his poetic odyssey included explorations of physical frailty, spiritual bewilderment, erotic love and metaphysical hunger. Darwish may very well have been one of the last great world poets.

More here.

Gregg Ross interviews Harry Collins in American Scientist:

As science and technology inform our society, we find ourselves increasingly reliant on experts. But what is an expert? How can we—professionals, policymakers, voters—assess the advice of others whose competence we don’t share? And what does this mean for the enterprise of science and for our society in general?

In Rethinking Expertise (University of Chicago Press, 2007), Cardiff University sociologists Harry Collins and Robert Evans consider these questions and offer a framework for exploring their import in science and in society. “Only this way,” they write, “can the social sciences and philosophy contribute something positive to the resolution of the dilemmas that face us here and now.”

American Scientist Online managing editor Greg Ross interviewed Collins by e-mail in March 2008.

What led you to this topic?

The idea of analyzing expertise grew out of my long study of the sociology of gravitational wave detection. I’ve slowly become a quasi-member of the gravitational wave community. This means I chat with my new colleagues in restaurants, cafeterias and coffee bars. I began to find I was talking physics—just the normal to-and-fro of science chat. Sometimes I would recommend that they try something different in the experiments and my remarks weren’t just shrugged off; for instance, I might be putting a case that had been considered and rejected for physics reasons that I could follow, or, rarely, I might even get something right.

More here.

Any poem that does not just slide past us like all those thousands of others usually has an ignition point for our attention. To take the most startling possible example, think of “Spring,” by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Everyone knows the first line because everyone knows the poem. “Nothing is so beautiful as Spring” is a line that hundreds of poets could have written, and was probably designed to sound that way: designed, that is, to be merely unexceptionable, or even flat. Only two lines further on, however, we get “Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens” and we are electrified. I can confidently say “we” because nobody capable of reading poetry at all could read those few words and not feel the wattage. Eventually we see that the complete poem is fitting, in its every part, for its task of living up to the standards of thought and perception set by that single flash of illumination.

But we wouldn’t even be checking up if we had not been put on the alert by a lightning strike of an idea that goes beyond thought and perception and into the area of metaphorical transformation that a poem demands.

more from Poetry Magazine here.

John McCain’s insistent recourse to “my friends” is easily the most mystifying verbal tic of any politician since Bob Dole’s out-of-body presidential campaign of 1996, which featured Dole’s not entirely reassuring promise that “Bob Dole is not some sort of fringe candidate.” Like Dole’s use of the dissociative third person—or illeism, a propensity also shared by Elmo and the Incredible Hulk—this year’s obsessive invocations to friendship invite scrutiny.

Is this a doctrine of pre-emptive friendship—immediately declaring crowds won over with an oratorical “mission accomplished”? Perhaps, but McCain’s friending is a strategy that hearkens back to classical rhetoric. Horace’s call to “amici” performed a similar function in ancient Rome, and Tennyson’s 1833 poem “Ulysses” drew upon that tradition for the immortal lines: “Come, my friends/ ‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.” (Rather less stirringly, it’s also the phrase of choice for the unctuous Rev. Chadband in Bleak House.)

more from Slate here.

When Prince Charles eventually becomes king, during ‘the most sacred part of the ceremony’ he will be anointed on his head, heart, shoulders, hands and elbows with ‘ambraegrisiae 3iiij’, a fragrant amber-coloured oil. Charles, a keen ecologist, will know this as ambergris, which comes from whales. That might worry him a bit. What may cause him more concern is that this nearly priceless substance (used by French parfumiers like Chanel, Dior and Givenchy), is actually extracted from, to use Philip Hoare’s exact words, ‘whale shit’. Amazing? This tremendous book – not long enough in my voracious view – tells us many astonishing things about man’s most tremendous prey, the whale. John F Kennedy’s widow, for example, placed a whale tooth carved with the presidential seal in her assassinated husband’s coffin. Right now, as you read this, whale oil lubricates the Hubble Space Telescope, ‘while the Voyager probe spins into infinity playing the song of the humpback to greet any friendly aliens – who may wonder at our treatment of the species with which we share our planet’.

more from Literary Review here.

///
…………………………….Van Gogh
…………………………….John Balaban
……………………………………….
Well, he lived among us and hated winters.
He moved to Arles where summer and blue jays
obliged him to cut off his ear.
Oh, they all said it was a whore
but Rachel was innocent. When cypresses
went for a walk in the prison yard
he went along and sketched them.
His suns surpassed God’s.
He spelled out the Gospel for miners
and their potatoes stuck in his throat.
Yes, he was a priest in sackcloth, who hoped
that one day humans would learn to walk.
He willed mankind his shoes.
………………………………
From Path, Crooked Path (Copper Canyon Press,
2006); translated by Lyubomir Nikolov and
the author

///

From Orion Magazine:

As a smart and well-connected young lawyer in Washington DC in the late 1960s, Charles Halpern took a leave from his corporate law firm and cofounded the first-ever public-interest law firm, the Center ofr Law and Social Policy. This new idea, he writes, was to “set up a nonprofit organization to handle cases representing unrepresented interests in Washington, dealing with big policy issues—the environment, consumer rights, corporate responsibility, the rights of mental patients.” Over the years, Halpern was involved in some landmark cases that ended up making the world a better place, including the Alyeska decision, which required the Mobil, Exxon, and Shell oil companies to consider, for the first time, the environmental impact of the eight-hundred-mile pipeline they built across the Alaskan tundra.

All along, Halpern was practicing more than law. He was seeking wise teachers, going into the wilderness, and learning to meditate. He raised eyebrows when he brought yoga to law students. But Halpern knew that effective advocates need to be centered and soul-fed. “As wisdom practice develops,” he writes, “clarity of vision emerges. We hold our ideas more lightly and see reality more clearly, less circumscribed by our inherited screens and filters, biases and preferences. We become more comfortable living with paradox, holding dissonant views.”

Making Waves and Riding the Currents is a compelling memoir with a simple message: Find the wise people in your life, and listen to them. In fact, listen to everyone more fully, even your opponents. Most importantly, listen to yourself—you’ll be less reactive and more productive for it.

More here.

From Science:

Like meadow voles, some men just don’t seem to be built for monogamy, whereas others, like swans, mate for life. New research hints that some of the difference might be due to a single genetic variation. The gene in question, AVPR1a, governs a receptor that regulates the brain’s production of vasopressin, a hormone that contributes to attachment behavior with mates and offspring. A few years ago, scientists found that when they added extra copies of the AVPR1a gene to the brains of promiscuous meadow voles, the animals began acting more like monogamous prairie voles, spending more time with partners and grooming offspring. A similar role for the AVPR1a gene has been observed in chimps and bonobos.

Might such a simple switch be found in humans? A team led by Hasse Walum of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, sequenced the AVPR1a gene in about 500 pairs of adult same-sex Swedish twins, all of them married or cohabiting for at least 5 years, and their partners. One variation of the gene was particularly common; about 40% of males had either one or two copies of a version–or allele–of the gene known as “334.” Although not simply an analog to the polymorphism found in prairie voles, allele 334 seems to have a similar effect on the stability of human relationships, as measured in interviews and questionnaires. The tests included a Partner Bonding Scale containing items that reflect affection and cooperation, such as “How often do you kiss your mate?” and “How often are you and your partner involved in common interests outside the family?” Scores on the test were significantly lower for the men carrying either one or two copies of allele 334 than for those without it.

More here.

Jay Dixit in Psychology Today:

“If the jester’s jokes are based on sound ideas, he becomes the thinker, the philosopher,” George Carlin said, “and if he uses dazzling language, he becomes a poet, too.” More than any comic in memory, Carlin achieved this transmutation—as much cultural essayist as comedian, beloved not just for his jokes but also for the rhythm and poetry of his words. Nine days before his death, he spoke to PT. Sadly, the two-hour interview would be his last. For an extended version, visit [here].

On experience. I’ve been doing this 50 years. By this time it’s all second nature. It’s all a machine—the observation, the immediate evaluation of the observation, the mental filing of it, writing it down. A 20-year-old has a limited amount of data. At 70, the matrix is more textured and has more contours to it. Observations are compared against a much richer data set.

On his gift for language. My grandfather was a New York City policeman. During his adult life, he wrote out Shakespeare’s tragedies longhand just for the joy it gave him. My mother had a great gift for language. My father was an after-dinner speaker, a great raconteur. They both were very funny and gifted verbally. The Irish have a genetic tradition, it seems, an affinity for language and expression. I got that. As the Irish say: “You don’t lick it off the rocks, kid.” It comes in the blood.

Nathan Schneider in Search Magazine:

[W]hat happens to religion when it is biologized? Many would intuitively believe philosopher and “New Atheist” Daniel Dennett, whose best-selling Breaking the Spell framed biologizing religiosity and overcoming it as two sides of the same coin; one leads naturally to the other. Confident in the possibility of this research, Dennett contends that “we” should “gently, firmly educate the people of the world, so that they can make truly informed choices about their lives,” choices that he believes will involve dispelling religion.

Less optimistically, but along similar lines, cognitive anthropologist Scott Atran suspects that “religious belief in the supernatural will be here to stay” despite those who come to understand it scientifically. He and other biologizers prefer to maintain a more agnostic stance than Dennett, purporting to pursue a scientific study of religion apart from biases and agendas. Scientific methods, they suggest, liberate the study of religion from ideological and theological debates.

Yet the lines between religion and the scientific study of it are not so clear. Biologizers depend on traditional ways of conceptualizing religiosity that have particular ideological connotations. In turn, believers of various stripes are eager to respond creatively to scientific research, and in some cases they head to the laboratory themselves to shed new light on their own beliefs and practices.

“I am a ‘left conservative.’” That was Norman Mailer’s jaunty but slightly defensive self-description when first I met him, at the beginning of the 1980s. At the time, I was inclined to attribute this glibness (as I thought of it) to the triumph of middle age and to the compromises perhaps necessary to negotiate the then-new ascendancy of Ronald Reagan. But, looking back over his extraordinary journal of a plague year, written 40 years ago, I suddenly appreciate that Mailer in 1968 had already been rehearsing for some kind of ideological synthesis, and discovering it in the most improbable of places.

Party conventions have been such dull spectacles of stage management for so long that this year it was considered nothing less than shocking that delegates might arrive in Denver with anything more than ceremonial or coronational duties ahead of them. The coverage of such events, now almost wholly annexed by the cameras and those who serve them, has undergone a similar declension into insipidity.

more from The Atlantic here.

When Emanuel Haldeman-Julius drowned in his backyard swimming pool, on July 31, 1951, he was popularly regarded as a has-been, even in his adopted hometown of Girard, Kansas.

It was an odd ending for a man who, in just over thirty years, had become one of the most prolific publishers in U.S. history, putting an estimated 300 million copies of inexpensive “Little Blue Books” into the hands of working-class and middle-class Americans. Selling for as little as five cents and small enough to fit in a trouser pocket, these books were meant to bring culture and self-education to working people, and covered topics ranging from classic literature to home-finance to sexually pleasuring one’s spouse. Distributed discreetly by mail order, Little Blue Books disseminated birth-control information not available in small-town libraries, advocated racial justice at a time when the Ku Klux Klan influenced politics, and introduced Euripides, Shakespeare, and Emerson to people without the means for higher education.

more from The Believer here.

In a culture obsessed with efficiency, daydreaming is derided as a lazy habit or a lack of discipline, the kind of thinking we rely on when we don’t really want to think. It’s a sign of procrastination, not productivity, something to be put away with your flip-flops and hammock as summer draws to a close.

In recent years, however, scientists have begun to see the act of daydreaming very differently. They’ve demonstrated that daydreaming is a fundamental feature of the human mind – so fundamental, in fact, that it’s often referred to as our “default” mode of thought. Many scientists argue that daydreaming is a crucial tool for creativity, a thought process that allows the brain to make new associations and connections. Instead of focusing on our immediate surroundings – such as the message of a church sermon – the daydreaming mind is free to engage in abstract thought and imaginative ramblings.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.