///
The Beautiful Lie
Sheenagh Pugh

He was about four, I think… it was so long ago.
In a garden; he’d done some damage

behind a bright screen of sweet-peas

– snapped a stalk, a stake, I don’t recall,

but the grandmother came and saw, and asked him:

“Did you do that?”
..

Now, if she’d said why did you do that,

he’d never have denied it. She showed him

he had a choice. I could see, in his face,

the new sense, the possible. That word and deed

need not match, that you could say the world

different, to suit you.
..

When he said “No”, I swear it was as moving

as the first time a baby’s fist clenches

on a finger, as momentous as the first

taste of fruit. I could feel his eyes looking

through a new window, at a world whose form

and colour weren’t fixed
..

but fluid, that poured like a snake, trembled

around the edges like northern lights, shape-shifted

at the spell of a voice. I could sense him filling

like a glass, hear the unreal sea in his ears.

This is how to make songs, create men, paint pictures,

tell a story.
..

I think I made up the screen of sweet peas.

Maybe they were beans; maybe there was no screen,

it just felt as if there should be, somehow.

And he was my – no, I don’t need to tell that.

I know I made up the screen.  And I recall very well

what he had done.

//

From Science:

Next time you pause to view a scenic mountain vista, consider that the oxygen your lungs are taking in resulted from the same process that raised those peaks. Researchers have connected the periodic formation of supercontinents in Earth’s geological past to the nourishment of tiny, oxygen-producing sea creatures, and the process continues to this day.

At least seven times, the massive plates that make up Earth’s continents have slammed together–sometimes two at a time, and sometimes all of them–forming what geologists call supercontinents. Those gradual collisions severely warped the intervening crust and pushed up high mountain ranges, such as the Himalayas. Each time, over millions of years, wind and rain wore down those mountains into dust that was flushed into the sea. There, minerals containing iron, phosphorus, and other elements became food for microscopic plant life that flourished and, through photosynthesis, boosted the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere. The result, a team reported on 27 July in Nature Geoscience, was that atmospheric oxygen content rose from what they call negligible levels about 2.65 billion years ago to about 21% today.

More here.

From The Independent:

Towards the end of this debut novel, its voluble, digressive, murderous protagonist makes a prediction: “White men will be finished in my lifetime,” he tells us. “In 20 years time it will just be us brown and yellow men at the top of the pyramid, and we’ll rule the world.” He’s talking about the phenomenon at the heart of this dazzling narrative: the emergence of that much-heralded economic powerhouse, the “new India”. You have, no doubt, read about it. In fact, you may have done so courtesy of Aravind Adiga, who is Time magazine’s Asia correspondent. But with The White Tiger, Adiga sets out to show us a part of this emerging country that we hear about infrequently: its underbelly. We see through the eyes of Balram, who was born into the “darkness” of rural India, but entered the light that is Delhi via a job as driver to Mr Ashok, the son of a rich landlord. Now, though, Balram has escaped servitude and is himself a rich businessman. What’s more, his unlikely journey involved a murder.

The result is an Indian novel that explodes the clichés – ornamental prose, the scent of saffron – associated with that phrase. Welcome, instead, to an India where Microsoft call-centre workers tread the same pavement as beggars who burn street rubbish for warmth. Adiga’s whimsical conceit is to give us Balram’s story via seven letters to the Chinese prime minister, who, Balram has decided, must be told the truth about India before a forthcoming state visit. So Balram begins: he tells of Delhi’s servants, who live in rotting basements below the glass apartment blocks that are home to their employers. He tells of how Ashok’s family bribe government ministers, and how national elections are rigged. Ashok, trendy and liberal, is forever expressing guilt over Balram’s treatment, but his fine words never come to anything.

More here.

With his tailor-made suits and thick black glasses, Salvador Allende did not look the part of a revolutionary. Indeed, his love of high-end clothing and fine wine would seem to belie his status as a champion of the working class. It is widely reported that at dinner parties in the Chilean presidential palace, Allende would approach nattily attired guests and say, half in jest, “That’s a nice jacket you’re wearing, but it would look even better on a president, don’t you think?” By night’s end, the guests would have dutifully contributed their jackets to Allende’s already extensive wardrobe.

But make no mistake about it: even though he was not as earthy or tousled as his contemporaries in Cuba, Allende was every bit as dedicated to revolutionary change. He simply disagreed with the means through which such change could come about. Instead of adhering to then ruling leftist practice of revolutionary change through violence and terror, Allende proposed an unprecedented democratic route to socialism, one where ballots would replace arms. It would be, in his words, “a revolution of empanadas and red wine”—socialism Chilean style.

more from n+1 here.

If you set aside the incomparable cruelty and stupidity of human beings, surely our most persistent and irrational activity is to sleep. Why would we ever allow ourselves to drop off if sleeping was entirely optional? Sleep is such a dangerous place to go to from consciousness: who in their right mind would give up awareness, deprive themselves of control of their senses, volunteer for paralysis, and risk all the terrible things (and worse) that could happen to a person when they’re not looking? As chief scientist in charge of making the world a better place, once I’d found a way of making men give birth, or at least lactate, I’d devote myself to abolishing the need for sleep. Apart from the dangers of letting your guard down, there’s the matter of time. Instead of trying to extend the life of human bodies beyond their cellular feasibility, the men and women in lab coats could be studying ways to retrieve all the time we spend asleep. A third of our lives, they say – and that probably doesn’t take the afternoon nap into account. Even if we died aged what is these days a rather youthful 70, finding a way to stay awake would increase our functional life to the equivalent of 93. And if we happened to live to 93 then we’d effectively be . . . oh, even older. Plus the nap time. Sleep, we’re told, is essential, repairing the wear and tear on body and mind, but sex was once solely for the purpose of propagating the species and we pretty much found a workaround for that biological constraint.

more from the LRB here.

H.L. Mencken famously called the martini “the only American invention as perfect as the sonnet.” The sonnet, as anyone who took freshman English may remember, is a poem with a specific meter, a structure of exactly 14 lines and a strict rhyme scheme. This being the age of free verse, no one writes sonnets anymore. Which is just as well, since almost no one reads poetry anymore.

I’ve been tasting a lot of silly drinks lately, and I believe we have entered the age of free verse in cocktails. Not long ago, for example, I attended an event that featured 10 of the best bartenders in the Washington area, all trying to out-mix one another. Here are some of the ingredients used in that evening’s cocktails: rose hips, yuzu juice, truffle oil, tarragon soda, homemade celery bitters, Sichuan pepper, tonka bean syrup and cherrywood-smoked white pepper meringue. Sometimes I think we’re all losing our minds; Mencken would not be amused.

more from the Washington Post here.

///
Money’s all there is, it makes the world go ’round
Money and only money, it can’t be denied.
Whatever you think about it
You won’t be able to do without it
take a tip from one who’s tried
………………………..—Dob Bylan (sic)

Money
Philip Larkin

Quarterly, is it, money reproaches me:
   ‘Why do you let me lie here wastefully?
I am all you never had of goods and sex.
   You could get them still by writing a few cheques.’

So I look at others, what they do with theirs:
   They certainly don’t keep it upstairs.
By now they’ve a second house and car and wife:
   Clearly money has something to do with life

– In fact, they’ve a lot in common, if you enquire:
   You can’t put off being young until you retire,
And however you bank your screw, the money you save
   Won’t in the end buy you more than a shave.

I listen to money singing. It’s like looking down
   From long French windows at a provincial town,
The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad
   In the evening sun. It is intensely sad.

///

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

I have just been watching Niall Ferguson bestride the globe. He does it in his documentary The War of the World, aired on PBS over the last three weeks. The documentary is the film version of his recent book of the same name. In the book he does a lot of bestriding, too. He ranges over the history of the 20th century, reordering and re-prioritizing as he sees fit. Ferguson is, to say the least, not very interested in the traditional historical narratives of the epoch. He is prepared to see things differently and to let everyone know that he is something of a maverick. Indeed, the documentary is chock full of lingering shots of Ferguson as he drives through or walks around important sites of the 20th century. Here he is, gazing wistfully up at the buildings as his car moves through the streets of Berlin. Next, see him standing meaningfully amidst the ruins of a village near the Greek/Turkish border as he talks about the forms of ethnic cleansing that went on in the area.

As far as technique goes, it is the very opposite of, for instance, the influential documentary makers Ric and Ken Burns (The Civil War, New York). For the Burns brothers, historical filmmaking is not so much about arguing over possible interpretations as about getting to the immediacy of the stories that are beyond interpretation. The Burns Brothers never show themselves. They keep the craftsman out of the picture. Tellingly, they pioneered the innovative technique of moving the camera slowly across or zooming in and out of still pictures and historical documents. The technique becomes a metaphor for the unbiased but sympathetic eye of “The Historian” writ large. The Burns brothers suggest that they are merely ciphers, mediums through which this ‘Historical Eye” can carry the definitive story of history directly out of the past and into the living present.

Ferguson puts himself front and center. Handsome, Scottish, bold. He wants to shock us with the audacity of his interpretations. This is part and parcel of his historical approach, in which the events being narrated and the characters doing the narration are tangled up in one another. History is a realm of contestation.

More here.

Charles Taylor in Dissent:

Like many utopian visions that someone is crazy enough to attempt to realize, modernist architecture has always contained an element of fascism. It wasn’t just that a cuckoo notion like Le Corbusier’s “radiant city,” those celery stalks of lone skyscrapers surrounded by a verdant wasteland, was meant to simplify life, but that it was in some basic sense meant to replace it.

The light and space essential to early modernist design were a response to the darkness and claustrophobia of Victorian architecture in which so many poor were imprisoned. But the modernists’ own language suggested that the masses would simply be serving a new master. You can’t describe a dwelling as a “machine for living,” as Le Corbusier did, without having abandoned what most of us associate with the word “home”: comfort, refuge, freedom from regulation, a respite from routine. If a house or a high-rise apartment building is a machine, those living in it must be the cogs. The ultimate fulfillment of Le Corbusier’s vision might be like a Prozac version of the workers trudging off to the mines in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, drudgery tidied up and narcotized.

It’s no accident that the fascist potential in modern architecture has been clearest to those who saw it firsthand. Writing about the shift in Britain from the semi-detached suburban homes of the 1930s to the anonymous blocks of estate housing built after the Second World War, the filmmaker John Boorman said, “Le Corbusier’s manic followers descended like shock troops bringing more destruction to England than Hitler.”

More here.

Namit Arora in Shunya’s Notes:

As a boy in India, I often heard rumors of “buggering” being commonplace in elite boarding schools for boys. This was partly spoken of as a passing phase of rakishness and fun, the subtext being: they’ll discover what real sex is when they grow up. In their lucid new book, The Indians, Sudhir and Katherina Kakar recount a story about Ashok Row Kavi, a well-known Indian gay activist. Apparently when Ashok was young and being pressured to marry by his family, especially by his aunt, he finally burst out that he liked to fuck men. “I don’t care whether you fuck crocodiles or elephants,” the aunt snapped back. “Why can’t you marry?”

As in many other societies, procreation also underpins the Indian sense of social and familial order. Any threat to this social order is instinctively resisted, though the resistance takes many forms. In the Christian West, homosexuality was persecuted as a sin against god (less often, it was seen as a disease). Indians, on the other hand, denied the very idea of homosexuality, while tolerating homosexual acts—a trick made possible by regarding these acts not as sex but as a kind of erotic fun, or masti. Sex is only what happens in the context of procreation, usually within marriage. Sex is what makes babies, and the truly virile men, of course, produce male babies.

It is no surprise then, that the notion of a homosexual liaison as a proud and equal alternate to a heterosexual one doesn’t exist outside a small set of urban Indians; that would be seen as a threat to the social order. Instead, the Indian response is: As long as men fulfill their traditional obligations to family and progeny, their homosexual acts are (uneasily) tolerated.

More here. Namit also provides this video of gay Indian-American comedian Vidur Kapoor:

From The New York Times:

It is well known that panes of stained glass in old European churches are thicker at the bottom because glass is a slow-moving liquid that flows downward over centuries. Well known, but wrong. Medieval stained glass makers were simply unable to make perfectly flat panes, and the windows were just as unevenly thick when new. The tale contains a grain of truth about glass resembling a liquid, however. The arrangement of atoms and molecules in glass is indistinguishable from that of a liquid. But how can a liquid be as strikingly hard as glass? They’re the thickest and gooiest of liquids and the most disordered and structureless of rigid solids,” said Peter Harrowell, a professor of chemistry at the University of Sydney in Australia, speaking of glasses, which can be formed from different raw materials. “They sit right at this really profound sort of puzzle.”

Philip W. Anderson, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist at Princeton, wrote in 1995: “The deepest and most interesting unsolved problem in solid state theory is probably the theory of the nature of glass and the glass transition.” He added, “This could be the next breakthrough in the coming decade.” Thirteen years later, scientists still disagree, with some vehemence, about the nature of glass. Peter G. Wolynes, a professor of chemistry at the University of California, San Diego, thinks he essentially solved the glass problem two decades ago based on ideas of what glass would look like if cooled infinitely slowly.

More here.

From Science:

Nine beers in one night could put even a seasoned drinker under the table. But the pen-tailed tree shrew in Malaysia consumes the equivalent of that in alcoholic nectar several nights a week, researchers have discovered, and six other species of animals there consume smaller amounts of alcohol as well. Unlike humans, the animals seem to suffer no ill effects from their habit. How they have evolved to tolerate alcohol could teach us something about the origins of human alcohol consumption and abuse, researchers say. The pen-tailed tree shrew (Ptilocercus lowii) is a small, ratlike animal that inhabits the jungles of Southeast Asia. It feeds on the nectar of an ever-flowering plant, the bertam palm, which is a primary food source for many other species as well, says Frank Wiens of the University of Bayreuth in Germany. Wiens was observing tree shrews feed in the Malaysian jungle when he noticed an oddly familiar odor: “The palms smelled like a brewery,” he says.

Wiens realized that some of the animals might be consuming huge amounts of alcohol, which prompted him and colleagues to spend more than 3 years in the field studying the ecology of the bertam palm. Yeast cells in the palm’s flowers ferment its nectar, they discovered, which can contain up to 3.8% alcohol–among the highest concentrations ever found in natural foods. The researchers observed seven mammalian species feeding on the nectar. The pen-tailed tree shrews guzzled the stuff longer than they did any other food source, for an average of 138 minutes per night, in the process helping to pollinate the plants. From the rate at which palm flowers were drained and refilled, the team calculated that, on average, the tree shrews meet or surpass the legal intoxication limit of 1.4 grams of alcohol per kilogram of body mass once every 3 days.

More here.

Sughra Raza. City lights. 2002.

Acrylic on canvas.

From the private collection of Jaffer Kolb; posted with permission.

Digital photograph, May 2008.

Christopher Hitchens in The Atlantic:

Salman Rushdie is so much identified with seriousness—his choice of subjects, from Kashmir to Andalusia; his position as a literary negotiator of East and West; his decade and more of internal exile in hiding from the edict of a fanatical theocrat—that it can be easy to forget how humorous he is. In much the same way, his extraordinary knowledge of classical literature sometimes causes people to overlook his command of the vernacular. Here are two examples of wit and idiom from his latest fiction, The Enchantress of Florence. In the first, an enigmatic wanderer, appareled in a coat of many colors, enters a splendid city:

Not far from the caravanserai, a tower studded with elephant tusks marked the way to the palace gate. All elephants belonged to the emperor, and by spiking a tower with their teeth he was demonstrating his power. Beware! the tower said. You are entering the realm of the Elephant King, a sovereign so rich in pachyderms that he can waste the gnashers of a thousand of the beasts just to decorate me.

This is the offbeat manner in which one might start a tale for children, as Rushdie did in Haroun and the Sea of Stories. By contrast, here is Ago Vespucci in Florence, trying by strenuous exercise in a whorehouse to cure his revulsion at the entry of the king of France to the city.

On the threshold of manhood Ago had agreed with his friend Niccolò “il Machia” on one thing: whatever hardships the times might bring, a good, energetic night with the ladies would put everything right. “There are few woes in the world, dear Ago,” il Machia had advised him when they were still only thirteen, “that a woman’s fanny will not cure.”

More here.

Ed Lake reviews Kluge by Gary Marcus and The Drunkard’s Walk by Leonard Mlodinow, in The Telegraph:

Why is our language so vague and ambiguous? Why are we so bad at sticking to plans, or keeping track of how we know what we know, or generally doing any of the things you’d hope to be able to do with a superlatively well-engineered brain?

Because it was a kluge. Evolution doesn’t, in fact, tend to perfection: it goes with what works and tinkers with it later. That’s why the retinas of vertebrates seem to be installed backwards, giving us all blind spots in the middle of our visual fields. Eyes like that do the job well enough, and there’s no way of flipping the retina while preserving decent vision across intermediate generations. So we’re stuck with them.

Likewise the mind: our meagre reasoning capacity is an afterthought, spatchcocked on to the ancestral systems that have the reins where practical decision-making is concerned. If only our higher mental functions could dominate; alas, the lizard- brain parts have seniority.

More here.

Thomas Schweich in the New York Times Magazine:

On March 1, 2006, I met Hamid Karzai for the first time. It was a clear, crisp day in Kabul. The Afghan president joined President and Mrs. Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Ambassador Ronald Neumann to dedicate the new United States Embassy. He thanked the American people for all they had done for Afghanistan. I was a senior counternarcotics official recently arrived in a country that supplied 90 percent of the world’s heroin. I took to heart Karzai’s strong statements against the Afghan drug trade. That was my first mistake.

Over the next two years I would discover how deeply the Afghan government was involved in protecting the opium trade — by shielding it from American-designed policies. While it is true that Karzai’s Taliban enemies finance themselves from the drug trade, so do many of his supporters. At the same time, some of our NATO allies have resisted the anti-opium offensive, as has our own Defense Department, which tends to see counternarcotics as other people’s business to be settled once the war-fighting is over. The trouble is that the fighting is unlikely to end as long as the Taliban can finance themselves through drugs — and as long as the Kabul government is dependent on opium to sustain its own hold on power.

More here.

Israel Rosenfield and Edward Ziff in the New York Review of Books:

Jean-Pierre Changeux is France’s most famous neuroscientist. Though less well known in the United States, he has directed a famous laboratory at the Pasteur Institute for more than thirty years, taught as a professor at the Collège de France, and written a number of works exploring “the neurobiology of meaning.” Aside from his own books, Changeux has published two wide-ranging dialogues about mind and matter, one with the mathematician Alain Connes and the other with the late French philosopher Paul Ricoeur.

Changeux came of age at a fortunate time. Born in 1936, he began his studies when the advent both of the DNA age and of high-resolution images of the brain heralded a series of impressive breakthroughs. Changeux took part in one such advance in 1965 when, together with Jacques Monod and Jeffries Wyman, he established an important model of protein interactions in bacteria, which, when applied to the brain, became crucial for understanding the behavior of neurons. Since that time, Changeux has written a number of books exploring the functions of the brain.

More here.

New Zealand artist Julian Oliver’s latest work, levelHead, allows viewers of the piece to interact with a 3D world by simply moving wooden blocks around in front of a web cam. How his work differs from most motion capture controlled art installations, is that the physical item that one uses to control the experience is replaced with a tiny digital world. Through moving and rotating coded blocks, the “player” attempts to move a tiny trapped man through an elaborate, interlocking labyrinth stretching one’s spatial memory and logical reasoning skills.

Kurt Vonnegut at the San Diego State University website:

1. Find a subject you care about

Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, and not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.

I am not urging you to write a novel, by the way — although I would not be sorry if you wrote one, provided you genuinely cared about something. A petition to the mayor about a pothole in front of your house or a love letter to the girl next door will do.

2. Do not ramble, though

I won’t ramble on about that.

3. Keep it simple

As for your use of language: Remember that two great masters of language, William Shakespeare and James Joyce, wrote sentences which were almost childlike when their subjects were most profound. “To be or not to be?” asks Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The longest word is three letters long. Joyce, when he was frisky, could put together a sentence as intricate and as glittering as a necklace for Cleopatra, but my favorite sentence in his short story “Eveline” is this one: “She was tired.” At that point in the story, no other words could break the heart of a reader as those three words do.

Simplicity of language is not only reputable, but perhaps even sacred. The Bible opens with a sentence well within the writing skills of a lively fourteen-year-old: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”

More here.