From Nature:

Champagne corks popped at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) this weekend after one of the facility’s four giant particle detectors tasted its first authentic data. Crammed into a stuffy control room on the afternoon of Friday 22 August, physicists tracked the debris produced by protons that had struck a block of concrete during a test of the €3 billion (£2.1 billion) collider’s beam-injection system.

Some 15 years in construction, the LHC is based at the European particle facility CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, and is due to fully switch on its proton beams on 10 September. But the LHC’s particle detectors have been recording hits from cosmic rays for several months — and Friday’s test now marks the first time particle tracks have been reconstructed from a man-made event generated by the collider. “It’s amazing to have seen the first LHC tracks,” Themis Bowcock of University of Liverpool, UK, who led the team, told Nature. “It’s quite overwhelming actually.”

The first useful physics data is expected to come in October, when the two counter-rotating beams of protons racing through the LHC’s 27-kilometre-long tunnels are made to collide, packing sufficient energy into a small enough space to produce fundamental particles from thin air. Full high-energy collisions at a combined energy of 14 trillion electron volts will begin next spring, exceeding the energies accessible to the current world record holder — the Tevatron at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois — by a factor of seven. The LHC’s high-energy collisions will allow physicists to search for new particles such as the fabled Higgs boson, which is thought to be responsible for conferring the property of mass on other particles.

More here.

Why would 21st century bird-watchers – to say nothing of doctors or architects – still consult watercolors and gouaches for information? It seems odd that painting would have anything to contribute to our accumulated trove of megapixels, much less that it would be a preferred medium among fact-seeking insiders. But painting offers something the mechanical methods don’t – a sophisticated technology of its own for showing us what we really need to see. And although Audubon himself (a fierce innovator) would probably be surprised to find his technique still going strong, his drawings provide an excellent example of just what makes painting so irreplaceable.

Looking at the many handsome examples in the new “Audubon: Early Drawings” – due to be published this fall by Harvard, this is the first book to collect and reproduce the pastel, ink, and watercolor studies from early in his career – it’s not hard to glean the first principle that makes his illustrations so effective: spareness. Although Audubon usually sketches in some contextual clues – a tree stump, some sand, three or four leaves – his pages are remarkably blank. What he is really studying is the bird, so Audubon surrounds the specimen – the osprey, the bullfinch, or the linnet – in white, letting his notes take care of the habitat, migration patterns, and the rest. Audubon preemptively limits the context, isolating and foregrounding the more salient details so we know at a glance what’s important and what isn’t.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

How Fiction Works isn’t actually about how fiction works. To be obsessed with the mechanics of words and sentences, to see literature as essentially an enclosed system with internal rules, is to be a formalist, and James Wood, for all his formality, isn’t a formalist. He admits as much. In the Preface to How Fiction Works Wood writes, “when I talk about free indirect style I am really talking about point of view, and when I am talking about point of view I am really talking about character, and when I am talking about character I am really talking about the real, which is at the bottom of my inquiries.” For James Wood, fiction is about the world, not about itself.

Wood calls his book How Fiction Works for two reasons. The first is that he’s a cocky son-of-a-bitch at the top of his game and he’s ready to make serious claims. He is in full confidence and he should be. Nobody else is writing about literature with anything like his pop and verve. The second reason is that he’s really using the word “works” in a secondary sense of the term. He isn’t using the word in the sense of “operates” or “functions.” He isn’t meaningfully interested in technique. Instead, he’s using “works” in the sense of: “Darling, that dress really works on you,” or, “I wouldn’t know what to do with that chair but it really works on this veranda.” “Works” here means something more like “comes together” or “does what it is generally meant to do.” The biggest clue — other than what Wood actually says in the book — that this is what he means by “works” is the title on the front cover. It isn’t How Fiction Works, but How Fiction Works. Already right there, in that emphasis, Wood is telling us that he’s after something bigger than mere technique. He is out for metaphysics, for an argument about the nature of reality and what it means to be a human “self.” That’s what Wood really cares about, and it just so happens that literature is in a special place to deliver the goods. Literature, to put it bluntly, has a special relationship to truth.

More here.

Matthew Syed in the Times of London:

I am often asked if the Olympic village – the vast restaurant and housing conglomeration that hosts the world’s top athletes for the duration of the Games – is the sex-fest it is cracked up to be. My answer is always the same: too right it is. I played my first Games in Barcelona in 1992 and got laid more often in those two and a half weeks than in the rest of my life up to that point. That is to say twice, which may not sound a lot, but for a 21-year-old undergraduate with crooked teeth, it was a minor miracle.

Barcelona was, for many of us Olympic virgins, as much about sex as it was about sport. There were the gorgeous hostesses – there to assist the athletes – in their bright yellow shirts and black skirts; there were the indigenous lovelies who came to watch the competitions. And then there were the female athletes – literally thousands of them – strutting, shimmying, sashaying and jogging around the village, clad in Lycra and exposing yard upon yard of shiny, toned, rippling and unimaginably exotic flesh. Women from all the countries of the world: muscular, virile, athletic and oozing oestrogen. I spent so much time in a state of lust that I could have passed out. Indeed, for all I knew I did pass out – in a place like that how was one to tell the difference between dreamland and reality?

It was not just the guys. The women, too, seemed in thrall to their hormones, throwing around daring glances and dynamite smiles like confetti. No meal or coffee break was complete without a breathless conversation with a lithe long jumper from Cuba or an Amazonian badminton player from Sweden, the mutual longing so evident it was almost comical.

More here.  [Thanks to Asad Raza.]

///

A Blade of Grass
Brian Patten
…………………
You ask for a poem.

I offer you a blade of grass.

You say it is not good enough.

You ask for a poem.

…………………

I say this blade of grass will do.

It has dressed itself in frost,

It is more immediate

Than any image of my making.

…………………

You say it is not a poem,

It is a blade of grass and grass

Is not quite good enough.

I offer you a blade of grass.

…………………

You are indignant.

You say it is too easy to offer grass.

It is absurd.

Anyone can offer a blade of grass.

…………………

You ask for a poem.

And so I write you a tragedy about

How a blade of grass

Becomes more and more difficult to offer,

…………………

And about how as you grow older

A blade of grass

Becomes more difficult to accept.

///

From Dawn:

Islamabad, Pakistan: A famed and eminent career in Urdu poetry and a life lived richly in the pursuit of progressive ideals has come to an end. Acclaimed, admired and widely sung, his poetry was rich in romance and progressive ideas on the side of the great unwashed and the downtrodden of the earth. His voice was unwelcome in the halls of power. He opposed usurpers and dictators alike. His reward was exile during the regime of Gen Ziaul Haq, who could not tolerate his association with the PPP government when he became the head of the Pakistan Academy of letters. Upon return of democratic rule, he was appointed head of the National Book Foundation. He earned recognition as a poet early with the publication of his first collection of verses. Successive books of poetry added to his stature as a leading poet of the country and the Urdu language.

His name is reckoned with among the great of his contemporaries — Faiz, Rashed, Ahmed Nadeem Qasmi. He had a strong bass and a plaintive Sing-song style of his own in which he recited his verse to adulating audiences at mushaeras that made him a household name among lovers of poetry. In the last decade of his life largely during general Musharraf’s regime he had a hard time keeping his job as head of the national book foundation that he ultimately lost. His subdued disclaimers had then no holds left and he came out openly against military dictatorship and returned the national award that had been conferred on him. Since then in all of his public appearances he was strong in his opposition to the unlawful regime. He gave his full support to the lawyers movement for the restoration of judiciary.

Although he will live in the romance and passion of his lyrical poetry, his death will e widely mourned, because in him the weak and the poor of the land have lost a friend.

(Note: Dedicated to my sister Dr. Atiya Khan and brother in law, Dr. Tariq Khan who were Faraz Sahib’s dearest friends. The entire Raza clans deeply mourns the loss of this beloved and great personality from our lives).

More here.

Naazish Ata-ullah. Transparency of Time 1.

Print.

More on this Pakistani artist here.

Ben Pleasants in 3:AM magazine:

Charles Bukowski loved the idea of poetry wars. Even at the lowest level of mimeo magazines, when he was co-editing Laugh Literary & Man the Humping Guns with Neeli Cherry, he jumped in guns blazing ready to take on the world. “Poetry,” he always said, “is a poor country without any boundaries. It’s open to all kinds of fools. All the poet has is his shitty little poem and his point of view. It’s like being on a bar stool, but with a piece of paper in your hand instead of a drink. You shout and scream and you hope someone will notice you.”

He thought poets were the spoiled children of literature: they had to do very little work to get published. They could write whatever they felt. Poetry was about feeling. It was not the complex work of a novelist or a journalist or a historian.

“Poets dazzle,” he said, “but often their best stuff is written in bitchy essays about what art is! When people call me a poet, it makes me want to vomit. I’m a writer!”

That was in 1976, when I was Arts editor of the L.A. Vanguard. I was doing a piece about Bukowski for the newspaper. Lory Robbin and I had showed up at Bukowski’s place on Carlton Way when he was first entertaining the woman who would later become Linda Bukowski. Lory got a great series of shots of the three of us drinking, while Bukowski was his usual outrageous self on tape.

The Vanguard had a policy about major pieces; they had to be approved by consensus. When I handed in my piece on Bukowski, it was turned down by a three to two positive vote. Dorothy Thompson and Ron Ridenour turned it down because they viewed Bukowski as reactionary and anti-feminist. I’d had this problem before.

From Reuters, in Yahoo News:

The world’s oldest recorded joke has been traced back to 1900 BC and suggests toilet humor was as popular with the ancients as it is today.

It is a saying of the Sumerians, who lived in what is now southern Iraq and goes: “Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap.”

It heads the world’s oldest top 10 joke list published by the University of Wolverhampton Thursday.

A 1600 BC gag about a pharaoh, said to be King Snofru, comes second — “How do you entertain a bored pharaoh? You sail a boatload of young women dressed only in fishing nets down the Nile and urge the pharaoh to go catch a fish.”

Jiri Pehe in the NYT:

At the official commemoration at Prague Castle, Vaclav Klaus, the president of the Czech Republic, gave a speech. The prime ministers of Slovakia and the Czech Republic opened an exhibition in Wenceslas Square — where Soviet troops had clashed with the citizens of Prague in 1968 — featuring a Soviet T-54 tank and homemade posters protesting the invasion. But most leading politicians limited themselves to brief statements.

Many leading thinkers here regarded the anniversary as unremarkable because they believe the Prague Spring was primarily a communist affair — an attempt by reformers to prevail over hard-liners within the party — and as such is of little interest to today’s authentic democrats. Articles in Czech news media argued that leaders of the Czechoslovak Communist Party in 1968, including First Secretary Alexander Dubcek, were naïve to think that they could sustain “socialism with a human face.” When they abolished censorship, tolerated artistic freedom, eased travel restrictions and allowed new civic movements to come into existence, they merely created a virus that threatened the communist system.

But as someone who experienced the Prague Spring at the impressionable age of 13, came of age during the repressive period of “normalization” and, from 1981 to 1989, observed my country from exile in the United States and Germany, I recall 1968 with fondness. And I suspect that our lasting reluctance to discuss the period openly is, more than anything else, a sign that the trauma of communism is still very much alive today, despite the last 19 years that democracy has had to take root.

The Onion.

For a certain generation of English artists, there have been enough Cézanne exhibitions to last more than one lifetime. These are the painters who had the gospel of Cézanne rammed down their gullets at art school, and who feel that the world has other things to offer. Roger Fry was the first great apostle of Cézanne in England, who at every opportunity lectured the unwary on the principles of ‘significant form’ and the consciousness-changing gifts of the master. Henry Tonks (who, as head of the Slade, resisted the siren call of modern art as forcefully as he could) caricatured him mercilessly in a 1922 painting called ‘The Unknown God’. Subtitled ‘Roger Fry Preaching the New Faith, Clive Bell Ringing the Bell’, it depicts the wild-eyed lecturer gesticulating madly while his accolyte chants ‘Cezannah, Cezannah’. Fry’s advocacy of Post-Impressionism went in and out of favour, but Cézanne’s theories became a mainstay of post-war art, and the central prop, for instance, of the Euston Road School. The influence was pervasive and it was against Cézanne’s distinctive palette of subtly modulated greens and blues that so many artists reaching maturity in the 1950s and 1960s rebelled.

more from The Spectator here.

(JOHN EDWARDS is in a Manhattan bar, talking to himself. Sad.)

JOHN EDWARDS

I’m running for president,
The highest office in the land.
Look, I’m right there in the mirror,
Smoothing my hair down with my hand.

I am handsome. Yes, it’s true.
And I am wealthy: that’s true, too.
But superficial things like that,
Well, they’re just not where I’m at.

You see, I care about the poor.
I often fret about their plight.
I adore the way I look
In this smoky barroom light.

(RIELLE HUNTER spots JOHN EDWARDS at the bar and approaches him.)

RIELLE HUNTER

Hi, I’m Lisa.
I mean Rielle.
Will you take me
To a hotel?

more from McSweeney’s here.

Praveen Swami in Outlook India:

India’s strategy — if it can be described as one — in essence appears to be one of retreat. Ever since the Police opened fire on protestors seeking to march across the Line of Control (LoC) to Muzaffarabad, leading to street battles which led to the loss of at least twenty lives, the Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) government has withdrawn from confrontation. Large parts of historic Srinagar are in the de-facto control of Islamist groups, with Police and CRPF personnel holding a handful of fortified pickets at major street corners.

Perhaps the most spectacular demonstration of just how far the state’s retreat has gone became evident on August 18, after the J&K government allowed Islamists to stage a massive pro-Pakistan protest in the heart of Srinagar — ignoring warnings from India’s intelligence services that the decision could lead to a meltdown of state authority. Led by the Tehreek-i-Hurriyat’s (TiH) Syed Ali Shah Geelani and the All Party Hurriyat Conference’s (APHC’s) Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, at the time of writing, tens of thousands of protestors assembled at Tourist Reception Centre in an unprecedented show of strength, even as Police were ordered off the streets to avoid confrontation.

Srinagar district Commissioner K. Afsandyar Khan and Senior Superintendent of Police S.A. Mujitaba were earlier despatched to stage negotiations on the management of the scheduled protests with Geelani — a de-facto acknowledgment that the Islamist leader has emerged as an alternate source of administrative authority. Their request for the protest to be scaled down was rejected by the Islamist leader. Governor N.N. Vohra and his advisors then ordered Director-General of Police Kuldeep Khoda to move his forces out of central Srinagar, to avoid clashes with protestors.

More here.

From Carl Zimmer’s excellent blog, The Loom:

I just found that Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, the 1980 TV series on life and the universe, is now on Itunes. You can get it here, at $1.99 an episode.

I’ve downloaded the first two episodes, which I don’t think I’ve seen since they first aired 28 years ago. I remember watching every episode intently as a 14-year old at the end of the Carter administration. The passage of time has revealed some hokiness around the edges.  The music, much of it by Vangelis, sometimes makes me think I’ve walked into a crystal shop. Sagan is fitted in corduroy blazers and what seems to be the precursor of the Members Only jacket. Some of the images still look good–like Sagan’s calendar of the cosmos–but there are also painfully long pans across a cardboard diorama of ancient amphibians, reptiles, and mammals. We are so spoiled today by Jurassic Park.

More here.

David Leonhardt in the New York Times Magazine:

As Barack Obama prepares to accept the Democratic nomination this week, it is clear that the economic policies of the next president are going to be hugely important. Ever since Wall Street bankers were called back from their vacations last summer to deal with the convulsions in the mortgage market, the economy has been lurching from one crisis to the next. The International Monetary Fund has described the situation as “the largest financial shock since the Great Depression.” The details are too technical for most of us to understand. (They’re too technical for many bankers to understand, which is part of the problem.) But the root cause is simple enough. In some fundamental ways, the American economy has stopped working.

The fact that the economy grows — that it produces more goods and services one year than it did in the previous one — no longer ensures that most families will benefit from its growth. For the first time on record, an economic expansion seems to have ended without family income having risen substantially. Most families are still making less, after accounting for inflation, than they were in 2000. For these workers, roughly the bottom 60 percent of the income ladder, economic growth has become a theoretical concept rather than the wellspring of better medical care, a new car, a nicer house — a better life than their parents had.

More here.

///

Bearhug
Michael Ondaatje

Griffin calls to come and kiss him goodnight
I yell ok.  Finish something I’m doing,
then something else, walk slowly round
the corner to my son’s room.
He is standing arms outstretched
waiting for a bearhug.  Grinning.

Why do I give my emotion an animal’s name,
give it that dark squeeze of death?
This is the hug which collects
all his small bones and his warm neck against me.
The thin tough body under the pajamas
locks me like a magnet of blood.

How long was he standing there
like that, before I came?

///

From Scientific American:

He has a name, but most people just know him as “the Star Wars Kid.” In fact, he is known around the world by tens of millions of people. Unfortunately, his notoriety is for one of the most embarrassing moments in his life. In 2002, as a 15-year-old, the Star Wars Kid videotaped himself waving around a golf-ball retriever while pretending it was a lightsaber. Without the help of the expert choreographers working on the Star Wars movies, he stumbled around awkwardly in the video. The video was found by some of the boy’s tormentors, who uploaded it to an Internet video site. It became an instant hit with a multitude of fans. All across the blogosphere, people started mocking the boy, making fun of him for being pudgy, awkward and nerdy.

Several remixed videos of the Star Wars Kid started popping up, adorned with special effects. People edited the video to make the golf- ball retriever glow like a lightsaber. They added Star Wars music to the video. Others mashed it up with other movies. Dozens of embellished versions were created. The Star Wars Kid appeared in a video game and on the television shows Family Guy and South Park. It is one thing to be teased by classmates in school, but imagine being ridiculed by masses the world over. The teenager dropped out of school and had to seek counseling. What happened to the Star Wars Kid can happen to anyone, and it can happen in an instant. Today collecting personal information has become second nature. More and more people have cell phone cameras, digital audio recorders, Web cameras and other recording technologies that readily capture details about their lives.

For the first time in history nearly anybody can disseminate information around the world. People do not need to be famous enough to be interviewed by the mainstream media. With the Internet, anybody can reach a global audience.

More here.

From The Guardian:

What an egregious conundrum Dirk Bogarde was. If anything, the present chunky volume of letters, which appears to be the final instalment of the massive memorial to him masterminded by John Coldstream, former books editor at the Daily Telegraph and author of the standard biography, only deepens the mystery. Probably the most successful British film actor since the war, Bogarde consciously withdrew himself from the arena at the height of his career, when he had starred not only in many brilliant commercial successes, British and international, but also in a sequence of superb films written by Harold Pinter and directed by Joseph Losey, and one of the few films – Victim, about a homosexual blackmailing – which had a manifest effect on British social attitudes. At this zenith, he left the country and took up residence in a land he hardly knew and whose language he didn’t speak, declaring himself disgusted with the film industry, Britain and indeed the world at large, which, he believed, was going to socialist hell in a handcart. He then emerged from this self-imposed rustication from time to time to appear in a number of remarkable films for foreign directors, including the art-house experimentalists Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Alain Resnais, creating a series of bold and subversive performances, while constantly giving interviews in which he trashed the art of acting as trivial, requiring no great skill or effort and, as he put it, “no job for a man”.

More here.

Over at Snagfilms, you can watch the entire documentary.

Dmitry Shostakovich, the greatest composer of the 20th century, remains one of its biggest mysteries. The nine chapters of the film are framed by nine days of the last round-trip journey of the composer’s life: a trip on a Soviet ocean liner to the United States. The film is narrated primarily in words of Shostakovich’s letters and diaries, which sharply contrast with the propaganda movies shown on board the ship, as the twentieth century itself weaves myth and reality. Never-before-seen archival fragments of the composer’s life – newsreel footage, photographs, letters, and personal memoirs – provide a unique perspective on issues of the artist versus the state, and truth versus survival. In contrasting official truth with personal truth, the film offers insight into the mystery of how Shostakovich was able to penetrate, through his music, the ironclad curtain and deeply affect Western audiences. Shostakovich’s music, full of dark sarcasm and glory, lyricism and sorrow, laughter and melancholy, plays the leading part throughout the film.