Our own PD Smith in The Guardian:

In 2001, a Russian arms-control researcher contacted the energy ministry to arrange a visit to the nuclear weapons design centre at Sarov. Three hours later they phoned back and told him to go to a specific ticket booth at Moscow’s Kazan train station. When he got there, he was handed a ticket for an overnight train to a totally different destination. In the middle of the night, his carriage was decoupled from the train and shunted on to another track. Eventually his train arrived at the main entrance to Sarov, a secret city during the cold war known only by its postcode, Arzamas-16. Uniformed guards entered his compartment and, after searching him and his belongings, they handed him his entry permit.

This story is told by Nathan Hodge and Sharon Weinberger, a husband-and-wife team of US defence reporters turned nuclear tourists. It could have come from a John le Carré novel, and it serves as a vivid example of the “culture of suspicion” that still dominates Russia’s nuclear establishment. Indeed, by the time Hodge and Weinberger visited in 2006, the level of paranoia had increased and their attempts to gain access to such sites were rejected. They had more luck, however, in the former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan. When it declared independence in 1991, it was the proud owner of the world’s fourth largest nuclear arsenal: 104 ICBMs and 40 bombers, a grand total of 1,360 warheads. Fortunately it agreed to give them up in 1994 and today, keen to reveal the full extent of its nuclear victimhood, Kazakhstan promotes the Semipalatinsk Test Site as a tourist destination. As Hodge and Weinberger discover, the site is still highly radioactive. Most of the scientists who lived in the nearby secret nuclear city of Kurchatov have now returned to Russia, but some technicians remain. Asked about the measures they took to protect themselves from radioactivity, one replies dryly: “Before every test, we drank grain alcohol.”

More here.

From Bill Moyers’ PBS webpage (via NoUtopia):

BILL MOYERS:

Welcome to the JOURNAL.

America’s in a pickle. Our friends, the Russians, with whom we were about to conduct joint military exercises, decided instead to attack some of our other friends, the Georgians, who not only aspire to democracy but control access to lots of oil and pipelines in which American energy companies have huge investments. But when President Bush demands Russia go home and leave Georgia alone, his pal Vladimir Putin – the modern Russian czar – gets that sardonic smile on his face.

He knows that American troops are spread so thin in Iraq and Afghanistan that Uncle Sam more resembles Gulliver, tied down by too many commitments, too much hubris, and too many mistakes, than he does to Superman. It’s a pickle and a predicament, and it’s serious.

The limits of American power have never been more vividly on display. That’s the subject of my conversation this week with Andrew J. Bacevich. Here is a public thinker who has been able to find an audience across the political spectrum, from THE NATION or THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE magazines, lecturing to college classes or testifying before Congress.

Bacevich speaks truth to power, no matter who’s in power, which may be why those of both the left and right listen to him.

Video and transcript here.

Someone recently posted the 1954 animated version of Orwell’s Animal Farm on Youtube. The film, the production of which was financed by the CIA, is divided there into 8 parts.  Here is the first of the eight:

Next week, or August 21st to be precise, will mark the 40th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and the end of the Prague Spring. Adam Michnik on the anniversary in the Guardian:

In August 1989, I proposed in the Polish diet a draft resolution apologising to the Czechs and Slovaks for Polish involvement in the 1968 invasion. I felt that a historical circle was being closed: the ideas of the Polish March and the Prague Spring, the ideas of our mountain meetings, were becoming political facts. Three months later, the Velvet Revolution began in Prague.

The main difference between the Prague Spring and the Velvet Revolution was that the former was mostly the work of Communist party members and others who wanted to bring about “socialism with a human face.” As a result, some people nowadays dismiss the Prague Spring as a power struggle between communists. But there were many roads to – and through – communism, and many of them converged with national traditions.

Indeed, communism was attractive for many reasons, including the idea of universal justice and humanised social relations; a response to the great spiritual crisis after the first world war and, later, to the Nazis’ genocide; and the conviction that western dominance of the world was nearing its end. Finally, in a world divided by Yalta, communism was, for some, the only realistic choice for central Europe.

In Czechoslovakia in 1968, communist reformers appealed to democratic ideals that were deeply rooted in the country’s pre-second world war past. Alexander Dubcek, the leader of the Czechoslovak communists and the symbol of the Prague Spring, personified hope for democratic evolution, real pluralism, and a peaceful way to a state governed by law and respectful of human rights.

By contrast, in Poland, which had witnessed its own tentative opening in the March student movement, a nationalist-authoritarian faction exploited all that was intolerant and ignorant in Polish tradition, employing xenophobia and anti-intellectual rhetoric. Mieczyslaw Moczar, the Polish interior minister and leader of the nationalist faction, combined communist rhetoric with a language proper to fascist movements in order to mobilise the masses against the “cosmopolitan-liberal intelligentsia.”

Those who read German may also want to take a look at this conversation between Jirí Dienstbier, Jirí Grusa, Lionel Jospin, Adam Michnik, Oskar Negt and Friedrich Schorlemmer im Gespräch on 1968 and 1989, in Eurozine.

Jackie Wullschlager in the FT reviews new books on Sartre and de Beauvoir, Germaine de Staël & Benjamin Constant, de Maintenon and Louis XIV, and the model wives of Cezanne, Monet & Rodin:

Twenty-one years ago, I reviewed on these pages the first biography of Simone de Beauvoir, by Claude Francis and Fernande Gontier, published just after her death in 1986. Focusing, inevitably, on her relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre, it was a work of romantic hagiography: “The two writers hid themselves more deeply in the chestnut groves. The most singular love story of the 20th century had begun.”

But soon after it appeared, a stash of de Beauvoir’s letters to Sartre, which she had claimed lost, revealed the celebrated partnership as a web of lies and manipulation, sustained by de Beauvoir’s role as pimp and procurer, supplying the icy Sartre with young girls to deflower – the only aspect of sex he really enjoyed – and engaging in erotic triangles that led third parties to breakdown or suicide.

Biographers fell on the pickings like vultures: Deirdre Blair in 2001, Hazel Rowley in 2005 and now Carole Seymour-Jones. While this played out, something happened to the study of history that de Beauvoir could only have dreamt of. Women and private life replaced men and public life as its central agenda, and biography – history’s populist arm – entered a feminised golden age. Brenda Maddox’s Nora (1988) shed light on James Joyce through his sexual encounters with Nora Barnacle. Amanda Foreman’s Georgiana (1998), launched by the biographer posing nude in Tatler, ushered in bodice-ripping accounts of 18th-century royal mistresses. Claire Tomalin’s Thomas Hardy, the Time-torn Man (2007) interpreted the novelist through the prism of his two unhappy marriages. Mainstream life-writing had become wife-writing.

The index of Ronald Hayman’s K – a biography of Kafka published to some acclaim in 1981 – contains the following entries under the name of Kafka, Franz: “suicidal impulses”; “self-dislike”; “inability to remember pleasant experiences”; “tormented by noises”; “compulsion to think badly of himself”; and, rather more mysteriously, “refusal of the food that life offers”.

There are plenty more along the same lines – but you get the idea.

This is the Kafka we’re most familiar with: the neurotic self-hater whose work came from his tortured psyche and whose genius went unrecognised during his tragic lifetime.

“The K-myth”, as James Hawes calls it in Excavating Kafka (perhaps with Hayman in his sights), is something we’re oddly fond of. Yet it suffers from a major flaw: it’s completely untrue.

more from The Telegraph here.

STORED in a sky-lit reading room on the top floor of the Biblioteca Nazionale in Naples are the charred remains of the only library to survive from classical antiquity. The ancient world’s other great book collections — at Athens, Alexandria and Rome — all perished in the chaos of the centuries. But the library of the Villa of the Papyri was conserved, paradoxically, by an act of destruction.

Lying to the northwest of ancient Herculaneum, this sumptuous seaside mansion was buried beneath 30m of petrified volcanic mud during the catastrophic eruption of Mt Vesuvius on August 24, AD79. Antiquities hunters in the mid-18th century sunk shafts and dug tunnels around Herculaneum and found the villa, surfacing with a magnificent booty of bronzes and marbles. Most of these, including a svelte seated Hermes modelled in the manner of Lyssipus, now grace the National Archeological Museum in Naples.

The excavators also found what they took to be chunks of coal deep inside the villa, and set them alight to illuminate their passage underground. Only when they noticed how many torches had solidified around an umbilicus — a core of wood or bone to which the roll was attached — did the true nature of the find become apparent. Here was a trove of ancient texts, carbonised by the heat surge of the eruption. About 1800 were eventually retrieved.

more from The Australian here.

Having been lashed by twice as many citations as even a formalist-cum-­structuralist should require, and having been incrementally diminished by Wood’s tone of genteel condescension (he flashes the Burberry lining of his jacket whenever he rises from his armchair to fetch another Harvard Classic), the common reader is likely to concede virtually anything the master wishes — except, perhaps, his precious time. For someone who professes to understand the fine machinations of characterization, Wood seems oblivious to the eminently resistible prose style of his donnish, finicky persona. “How Fiction Works” is a definitive title, promising much and presuming even more: that anyone, in the age of made-up memoirs and so-called novels whose protagonists share their authors’ biographies and names, still knows what fiction is; that those who do know agree that it resembles a machine or a device, not a mess, a mystery or a miracle; and that once we know how fiction works, we’ll still care about it as an art form rather than merely admire it as an exercise. But there is one question this volume answers conclusively: Why Readers Nap.

more form the NY Times here.

In September 2006, Mahmoud Darwish bids Edward Said farewell in Al-Ahram:

……

I say: The life which cannot be defined

except by death is not a life.

***

He says: We shall live.

So let us be masters of words which

make their readers immortal — as your friend

Ritsos said.

***

He also said: If I die before you,

my will is the impossible.

I asked: Is the impossible far off?

He said: A generation away.

I asked: And if I die before you?

He said: I shall pay my condolences to Mount Galilee,

and write, “The aesthetic is to reach

poise.” And now, don’t forget:

If I die before you, my will is the impossible.

***

When I last visited him in New Sodom,

in the year Two Thousand and Two, he was battling off

the war of Sodom on the people of Babel…

and cancer. He was like the last epic hero

defending the right of Troy

to share the narrative.

…….

More here.

Sinan Antoon recalls the voice of a nation in Al-Ahram:

Very few poets become the voice of their nation and even fewer succeed in transcending that to become much more. Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008) was that rare bird who crossed many skies and horizons. His death last week, following complications from open-heart surgery in Houston, Texas, ended an epic life and interrupted a stunningly creative and prolific output, especially in his later years. It is difficult to underestimate Darwish’s symbolic capital and his cultural and political significance. With his departure Palestine loses one of its most precious cultural icons, a poetic voice of universal echoes. The larger Arab world and its diaspora bid farewell to one of its best modern poets and the most popular and successful one in the last three decades. His poems were set to music, discussed in the Israeli Knesset, and his recitals could fill sport stadiums. Darwish’s absence will further enhance his near-mythical status in the collective memory of Palestinians and Arabs.

Darwish was born on 13 March 1941 in Al-Birweh in Palestine’s Galilee. At the age of seven he and his family were forced by Israeli forces to flee their village to Lebanon. Al-Birweh was destroyed by the Israelis and a settlement has taken its place. When Darwish’s family returned a year later they settled in Deir Al-Assad, near the traces of their destroyed village. The harrowing experience of losing his home and being an internal exile in his land at such a young age would haunt Darwish’s poetry and become a central theme with rich and complex variations running throughout his oeuvre. “I will never forget that wound,” he said. In one of his last books Darwish wrote of still hearing “the wailing of a village under a settlement”.

More here.

Mourid Barghouti in The Guardian:

A hot midday on a hillside overlooking Ramallah, a blue sky with some bashful, short-lived clouds and Palestinian flags everywhere, side by side with his photo – and the voice of Mahmoud Darwish reciting his own poetry came pure and powerful through the huge loudspeakers and covered the whole landscape. In the middle of the courtyard of Ramallah’s Cultural Palace, where he’d given his last poetry reading a few weeks ago (at which he read “The Dice Player”), the empty grave was waiting for the body of the poet. The roads up the hill carried wave after wave of people of all ages and affiliations, all trying hard to get as close as possible to the grave to say goodbye to their poet. As the coffin was lowered into the ground, a small regiment of Palestinian security officers had to restrain a crowd struggling to look at the grave, and another fired 21 shots in salute.

We circled around the grave, and I found myself next to his mother, Houria, aged 92 – who was brought from Galilee in an ambulance and brought on a wheelchair to have a last glance at her boy, whose most famous line is “I yearn for my mother’s bread and my mother’s coffee” – and his two brothers, Ahmad and Zaki. I saw his sisters only after the ceremony was over. The family was almost apologetic for their presence among those thousands of mourners; his mother, in her feeble, broken voice, said: “He is the son of all of you.” This was the first time I had seen his mother. She does not travel, and I am not allowed to go to Galilee.

Earlier in the day, just before 10am, Darwish’s body arrived on a flight from the United States in Amman, Jordan. After a short ceremony the casket was loaded on to a Jordanian military helicopter, which flew to Ramallah, landing at noon. Far from Ramallah, a procession left the Ahihud junction, east of Acre, heading towards the former village of Al-Birweh, where Darwish was born.

More here.

When Václav Havel first entered Prague Castle after becoming president of Czechoslovakia in 1989, he and his team (“a group of friends from various branches of the arts”) found wires and concealed microphones everywhere, and a map revealing secret rooms. It was “an enchanted Kafkaesque castle” and, as he reveals in this candid memoir, his time there frequently struck him as absurd. What he most remembers from those heady, almost hysterical early days is that “we laughed a lot, though I can hardly remember what we laughed at or why”. Yet the laughter soon died away, and this is primarily a book about disillusionment.

more from The Guardian here.

As we scome to the end of the 200th anniversary of the publication of the Phenomenology of Spirit (PhS),[1] I am reminded of a remark made a decade ago by the noted Hegel-scholar Robert Pippin. He then entertained the possibility of what a sequel to the PhS would look like were Hegel able to complete one. In his mind, the sequel would present two new chapters, which “would have to include oddly parallel accounts of both [a] the great expanding confidence and influence of modern science and technology…and [b] the coincident ever-growing pessimism that all of that, and much of anything else, matters all that much….”[2] Pippin rightly recognized the need of new “shapes of Spirit” relevant for at least a 1997 PhS. He had seen in the trajectories of these two large-scale cognitive and ethical enactments “contradictory” outcomes in which the success of (a), in fulfilling ideals that have been set for modern science and technology, comes at once with (b), with a disposition that ever loosens the normative grip their ideals are to have on us.

I myself admit that Pippin’s selections to a hypothetical sequel to the PhS and his evaluations for those selections are on point. However, I would like to make a suggestion of my own to such a sequel. With all the discussion, both critical and uncritical, on racial oppression and cultural diversity over the distant and recent past, a shape of spirit accounting for a conceptualization of these matters appears to me quite apropos.

more from Logos here.

It is a bold historian who writes a history of the Caucasus, as events of the past week have made all too clear. The region may not be much bigger than England and Wales, but its history involves three unrelated indigenous groups of people – the Abkhaz and Circassians in the north-west, the Chechens, Ingush and Dagestanis in the north-east, the Kartvelians (Georgians, Mingrelians and Svans) in the south – and representatives of many Eurasian groups (Iranian, Turkic, Armenian, Semitic, Russian) who have settled there over the past 2,000 years.

Some forty mutually unintelligible languages, of which a handful are established literary languages and several others have only a precarious recent literary status, are spoken. Worse for anyone trying to present a coherent narrative, these disparate peoples have very different histories, and only two, the Georgians and Armenians (some would add the Azeris), have a history of statehood consistent enough to be retold as one would retell the history of a West European country.

more from the TLS here.

A couple of weeks ago I borrowed a camcorder from a friend to videotape an interview with a scientist visiting my small alpine town of Brixen (Dr. Sudhir Paul–see last post) for 3QD. For various reasons, we never got the chance to do the interview, but the next day, after he had left, my sister-in-law came to visit and asked why I had a camera sitting on a tripod in my living room. I told her, and she suggested that we make a short movie just for fun before giving the camera back (it was a Saturday afternoon and we were all bored!). I wrote a 3-minute screenplay quickly that all four of us present could act in, and we filmed it in the next hour. Later that evening I edited it into a “film” using the Windows Movie Maker software that came pre-installed on my laptop. Okay, so I’m no Wes Craven (though we are both Johns Hopkins alumni) but, in any case, I present it here for your amusement:   🙂

David Brown in the Washington Post:

Some long-term survivors of HIV infection produce rare and extremely potent antibodies that keep the disease from progressing to AIDS, and might point to a way to protect uninfected people from the virus, researchers reported yesterday in the closing hours of the 17th International AIDS Conference in Mexico City.

The antibodies, against a particular part of a much-studied HIV protein called gp120, might prove useful as a microbicide for blocking infection during sexual intercourse. If researchers could find a way to prompt the immune system to make its own supply of the antibodies before encountering the virus, they would have a vaccine…

The search for both an AIDS microbicide and a vaccine has been particularly frustrating. None are in use, and some candidates tested in recent years have turned out to increase the risk of infection.

The antibodies described yesterday attack a small and crucial region of HIV’s outer shell where the virus binds to its chief prey, immune-system cells called lymphocytes. Acting as an enzyme, the antibody clips the attachment point, and falls away undamaged and ready to do the job again.

More here.

From The New Republic:

Every reader of this magazine is likely to have heard of the “Sokal hoax,” the most celebrated academic escapade of our time. Everyone is also likely to know the story in outline: how in 1996 the radical “postmodernist” journal Social Text published an article submitted by Alan Sokal, a mathematical physicist at New York University, with the mouthwatering title “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” Sokal then revealed the article to be a spoof, a tissue of nonsense that he had painstakingly assembled in order to parody the portentous rubbish that flew under the colors of postmodernism. By publishing Sokal’s submission, the emperors of that tendency revealed themselves to be as naked as the rest of academia had always suspected, and with this one coup Sokal himself became the toast of the town, a celebrity, a hero of the resistance.

Since then, he and others have written extensively about the hoax and its significance. Some have attempted to defend the editors of Social Text, but they could not do much to stop the laughter. Some pursed their lips at the impropriety of hoaxing, but ridicule is a good weapon. Most thought that the editors had brought it on themselves. Sokal himself has written numerous essays, and also a book about it, with Jean Bricmont (Impostures intellectuelles, published in America in 1998 as Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science). His new book brings together ten essays, beginning with a thoroughly annotated text of the hoax submission itself. Most of these essays have been published at various times since the hoax came out, and the hoax itself, in all its delicious pottiness, is easily available on the Web.

More here.

From Scientific American:

As far as we know, no dog can compose music, no dolphin can speak in rhymes, and no parrot can solve equations with two unknowns. Only humans can perform such intellectual feats, presumably because we are smarter than all other animal species—at least by our own definition of intelligence. Of course, intelligence must emerge from the workings of the three-pound mass of wetware packed inside our skulls. Thus, researchers have tried to identify unique features of the human brain that could account for our superior intellectual abilities. But, anatomically, the human brain is very similar to that of other primates because humans and chimpanzees share an ancestor that walked the earth less than seven million years ago.

Accordingly, the human brain contains no highly conspicuous characteristics that might account for the species’ cleverness. For instance, scientists have failed to find a correlation between absolute or relative brain size and acumen among humans and other animal species. Neither have they been able to discern a parallel between wits and the size or existence of specific regions of the brain, excepting perhaps Broca’s area, which governs speech in people. The lack of an obvious structural correlate to human intellect jibes with the idea that our intelligence may not be wholly unique: studies are revealing that chimps, among various other species, possess a diversity of humanlike social and cognitive skills. Nevertheless, researchers have found some microscopic clues to humanity’s aptitude. We have more neurons in our brain’s cerebral cortex (its outermost layer) than other mammals do. The insulation around nerves in the human brain is also thicker than that of other species, enabling the nerves to conduct signals more rapidly. Such biological subtleties, along with behavioral ones, suggest that human intelligence is best likened to an upgrade of the cognitive capacities of nonhuman primates rather than an exceptionally advanced form of cognition.

More here.

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Heaven Watches On
Bai Hua

Twilight falls
My homeland dries out
A line of soldiers pass outside my home
Five willow trees stand before the gate

I sit bored by a window
Watching a man in the street eat beans
Someone opposite is ramming the earth
Someone stands around for no reason
Gazing at the hills opposite

The day is about to go out
Landlords will soon be killed
Let them do as they please
The Reds are on their way

Translation -Simon Patton 2008
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Or at least the first 7 minutes of the Julian Temple documentary about the late Joe Strummer.