1968? Delayed offshoot of European totalitarianism or groundswell of liberalisation and democraticisation. Talking to Stefan Reinecke and Jan Feddersen, historian Götz Aly and educationalist Katharina Rutschky cannot agree.

taz (die Tageszeitung): Ms. Rutschky, what scenes do you recall when you think of 1968?

Katharina Rutschky: One wonderful scene was the Berlin International Vietnam Conference of February 1968. We had the feeling that the future belonged to us, that it was our turn now. I experienced two wonderful things: 1968 and German reunification….

Didn’t you perceive 1968 as a liberation?

Aly: Of course. In 1967 German students still addressed one another formally, as Fräulein Schmidt or Herr Aly. They wore pleated skirts or ties and jackets, and had nervous breakdowns every time they had a meeting with a professor. But all the writing about emancipation from that era is unbearable junk. Not only the theoretical stuff, even publications about private kindergartens. They don’t contain one reasonable sentence, nothing that one could profitably read today.

more from Sign and Sight here.

Pound’s aspirations for literature were grand. He believed that bad writing destroyed civilizations and that good writing could save them, and although he was an élitist about what counted as art and who mattered as an artist, he thought that literature could enhance the appreciation of life for everyone. He was vain and idiosyncratic, but he had no wish to be a prima donna. No doubt Eliot, James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, H.D., Ernest Hemingway, Ford Madox Ford, and Marianne Moore would have produced interesting and innovative work whether they had known Pound or not, but Pound’s attention and interventions helped their writing and sped their careers. He edited them, reviewed them, got them published in magazines he was associated with, and included them in anthologies he compiled; he introduced them to editors, to publishers, and to patrons; he gave them the benefit of his time, his learning, his money, and his old clothes. “A miracle of ebulliency, gusto, and help,” Joyce called him. It’s true that he was flamboyant, immodest, opinionated, tactless, a pinwheel of affectation; he made people crazy and he became crazy himself. Gertrude Stein’s description of him is frequently invoked: “A village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.” In his devotion to the modernist avant-garde, though, he was selfless. “A bombastic galleon, palpably bound to, or from, the Spanish Main,” Wyndham Lewis wrote about meeting Pound. “Going on board, I discovered beneath its skull and cross-bones, intertwined with fleurs de lys and spattered with preposterous starspangled oddities, a heart of gold.”

more from The New Yorker here.

By the time he sailed to France from New York in 1947, Richard Wright was a star, fixed in the literary firmament. Two of his books – Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945) – had risen high in the US best-seller lists, and were being translated into European languages. In Paris, Wright was aggrandized by the reigning intelligentsia: he and his wife became friendly with Simone de Beauvoir (Ellen Wright would later act as Beauvoir’s agent), and to a lesser extent with the non-English-speaking Sartre and other members of the Temps Modernes circle. Boris Vian borrowed the grisly mechanism of Native Son – black boy kills white girl, then kills another girl – for his scandalous novel J’irai cracher sur vos tombes, which he published under the pen name “Vernon Sullivan”, who was allegedly a black American. The success of his books, and a shrewd property investment in Greenwich Village, had made Wright prosperous. A photograph of the early 1950s shows the family at the table in their well-appointed flat in rue Monsieur le Prince, being attended by a uniformed maid. Except for one brief visit during the making of a film of Native Son, in which the forty-one-year-old Wright took the role of his teenage anti-hero Bigger Thomas, he never returned to the United States. Wright was a true “black first”: a cosmopolitan writer and intellectual with popular appeal.

As soon as the lights went down on the welcoming party, the star began its decline

more from the TLS here.

///
Home
Steve Luttrell

one comes to it
in some measure,
slowly

finds a place and
standing

makes it his
and calls by name

the several others
in company w/ him.

one comes to it—
lays down

and takes his
rest there,

comfortably
continuing his

days there
in that place.

//

From The Root:

In a conversation with The Root  Editor-in-Chief Henry Louis Gates Jr., Watson clarified his views about race and genetics.

James Watson has long assumed a certain special status among American scientists. The molecular biologist was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962, along with Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, for, as the Swedish Academy put it in its announcement for the prize, “their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material.” Watson and his British colleague Crick are remembered popularly for identifying the elegant and unexpected “double helix” three-dimensional structure of deoxyribonucleic acid, commonly known as DNA. Watson’s important contribution to this uncanny discovery was to define how the four nucleotide bases that make up DNA—guanine (G), cytosine (C), adenine (A) and thymine (T)—combine in pairs to form its structure. These base pairs turn out to be the key to both the structure of DNA and its various functions. In other words, Watson identified the language and the code by which we understand and talk about our genetic makeup.

I have been among those who have long held Watson in high regard for several reasons. First of all, the discovery of DNA’s three-dimensional structure was counterintuitive; it was an ingenious act of deduction, using models made of cardboard and paste with an exacto knife and a straight edge. How Watson and Crick, working at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, became the first scientists to identify this elusive structure is the stuff of drama, especially when we recall that Watson was just 25 years old when he and Crick published their findings in the journal Nature on April 25, 1953.

Though Watson would tell me during our recent interview that he had a rather low IQ, as proof that IQ tests aren’t really that important, he enrolled at the University of Chicago when he was merely 15 and earned his B.S. in zoology there in 1947 at the age of 19 and a Ph.D. in zoology from Indiana University at age 22. He was 34 when he won the Nobel Prize. Not too shabby for a guy with a “low” IQ.

More here.

From Nature:

Some cancers can release a protein that awakens dormant cancer cells throughout the body, studies in mice suggest. The discovery could help doctors understand and prevent the spread of cancers through the body. The results provide a possible explanation for why high levels of the protein, called osteopontin, in cancer patients have already been linked to an increased risk of death. Researchers are working to develop a drug that blocks the protein as a possible tool in the battle against the disease. Most patients who die from cancer do not succumb to the initial cancer, called a primary tumour, but rather from the disease’s spread to other parts of the body. Although the importance of this process, called metastasis, is clear, there is no currently available therapy that can specifically block this sinister march throughout the body.

McAllister and her colleagues, led by the Whitehead Institute’s Robert Weinberg, co-implanted two kinds of cancer cells in mice. The first, which they termed an ‘instigator’ tumour, was made of fast-growing breast-cancer cells cultured in the lab. They also injected other cancer cells, called ‘responder’ cells, which were known to grow slowly and metastasize only rarely. They found that the presence of the instigator tumour was enough to speed development of the responder, which then spawned up to nine times as many metastatic tumours as when the instigator was absent. They found similar results when they repeated the experiment using colon cancer cells collected from cancer patients as the responder tumours. Subsequent analysis showed that the osteopontin protein is crucial for this instigator effect.

More here.

//./
Red Gloves
Andrew Motion

Reaching the restaurant late
I find the empty shells
Of your gloves on the cold curb:

Stretchy, crushed red velve
Which slithered off your lap
To float in the sodium stream.

What could they mean, except
You have arrived before me,
And simply taken your place?

The things we forget, or lose,
Live in a heaven of debris,
Waiting for us to collect them;

Already your naked hands
Are fluttering over the table,
Missing they don’t know what.

//

From The Guardian:

“It is the ambition of The Book of Dead Philosophers to show that often the philosopher’s greatest work of art is the manner of their death,” says Critchley.

1. Heracleitus (540-480 BC)
Heracleitus became such a hater of humanity that he wandered in the mountains and lived on a diet of grass and herbs. But malnutrition gave him dropsy and he returned to the city to seek a cure, asking to be covered in cow dung, which he believed would draw the bad humours out of his body. In the first version of the story, the cow dung is wet and the weeping philosopher drowns; in the second, it is dry and he is baked to death in the Ionian sun.

Note: And here is my personal favorite.

9. AJ Ayer (1910-1989)
The year before he died, after recovering from pneumonia in University College Hospital in London, Ayer choked on a piece of salmon, lost consciousness and technically died. His heart stopped for four minutes until he was revived. A day later, he had recovered and was talking happily about what had taken place during his death. He saw a bright red light which was apparently in charge of the government of the universe. The ministers for space were oddly absent, but Ayer could see the ministers in charge of time in the distance. Ayer then reports that he suddenly recalled Einstein’s view that space and time were one and the same and tried to attract the attention of the ministers of time by walking up and down and waving his watch and chain. To no avail, however, and Ayer grew more and more desperate and then regained consciousness. Ayer was shaken by the experience and in an article for the Sunday Telegraph, he suggested that it did provide “rather strong evidence that death does not put an end to consciousness”.

More here.

From Edge:

Edge has received notice from the publisher that acquired PRC Chinese language rights to What Is Your Dangerous Idea?: Today’s Leading Thinkers on the Unthinkable that the book “can’t be published in China because some content is not accordant to Chinese regulations, for example, some content about religious, soul.” [sic]

The book, based on an edited selection from The 2006 Edge Question, was published last year in the US (HarperCollins) and the UK (Free Press) as well as a number of foreign-language markets.

“There is a profound issue lurking here,” writes Pinker. “Everyone says that China will be the next scientific and economic power. Is this compatible with their ongoing rejection of open debate and exploration of ideas? Is a technologically advanced society compatible with anti-intellectualism and suppression of debate? It’s hard to see how China will ever compete with the West as a source of scientific and technological innovation if ideas cannot be discussed and evaluated. Or will the Internet — which can never be completely censored — and a stream of PhDs returning from the West eventually pressure them to open up?”

More here.

He was the patron saint of the amateur. By pretending to be George Plimpton in Mozambique, could I become him?

Graeme Wood in The Smart Set:

Is the world a stale and weary place, now that George Plimpton (1927-2003) is no longer in it? Hardly. But if it still seems fresh with possibility, Plimpton deserves his share of credit for making it so. His legacy is the magazine he edited — The Paris Review — but he is known best for his larks: quarterbacking the Detroit Lions, playing the triangle in Bernstein’s New York Philharmonic, boxing against Sugar Ray Robinson, tending goal for the Bruins, playing piano at an Apollo talent show. (He won second prize, narrowly edging out a guy who played a watering can.) He appeared in so many films that they called him “the Prince of Cameos.” In a way, the denial phase in grieving Plimpton’s death is prolonged by the suspicion that he’s secretly just on temporary assignment in the afterlife, having secured unprecedented permission to harvest souls for a few years as an understudy to the Grim Reaper. But even assuming that his passing is permanent, his example is sweet consolation, for it suggests that the universe — being merciful — has a place for incorrigible dilettantes.

This incorrigible dilettante spent months in Mozambique in the middle of 2001, writing a travel guide to the country. Plimpton had, in a way, prompted my exile. I met him once, when he was the dinner entertainment at a formal event at Harvard University in 2000. Our conversation didn’t last long — it was cut short by Tommy Lee Jones, even gruffer in person than on screen — and produced no anecdote worth remembering, other than the simple thrill of a handshake with a legend. But it did lead to the realization that I had to get out of the country if I wanted Plimptonian hijinks: I would not find it among crusty old Harvard men.

And, as I hoped, in Mozambique the hijinks found me, although they took a couple of weeks to reach anything near Plimptonian levels.

More here.

Subhash Gatade in CounterCurrents:

Any close watcher of the Nepal situation would tell you that [former foreign minister of India] Jaswant Singh is not alone in having and expressing a negative opinion about the developments in the newest republic which has seen the end of 250 year old monarchy and the end of the ‘model Hindu Rashtra’ much espoused by the Sangh Parivar organisations. In one of his recent outbursts, Mr Ashok Singhal, the International President of Vishwa Hindu Parishad is reported to have compared Jihadists and Maoists who would together bring further calamity to the tiny country.

It was expected that all such outbursts from the BJP and its allied organisations would be immediately rebuked by the Nepalese leaders. Rambahadur Thapa, a senior leader of NCP (Maoists) called all such utterances ‘anti-Nepal’ and an ‘intervention in the internal affairs of the country’.

Perhaps one needs to ask oneself why does Mr Singh feels pertrubed over the end of a regime which concentrated all power in the hands of a small caucus centred around the King which denied basic human rights to a vast majority of Hindus and which condemned the followers of the other religions to a secondary status. Whether it has to do with emergence of NCP (Maoists) as the single largest party in the new republic which has humbled all the other parties or it has to do with the emergence of the most diverse and representative parliament in the world today. Independent observers have noted that the newly elected Nepalese parliament  has more than one third of women and other one third representation is from the different ethnicities and oppressed castes.

Of all the many disappointments of 1977, the ITV series Man from Atlantis has to be one of the greatest. The title suggested a programme that would have something to do with the lost underwater kingdom described in great detail by Plato in the Timaeus and Critias. But the reality was Patrick Duffy with webbed hands and fluorescent green contact lenses, painfully painted on. Sole survivor of Atlantis, he used his special powers, notably the ability to survive high atmospheric pressure, to foil the evil plans of an evil-looking villain with an evil-looking beard and an evil-sounding German name: Schubert.

Even my enormous teenage appetite for the fantastical and men in swimming trunks was sated quite quickly; there was too much oceanology and not nearly enough Atlantis. So now, thirty years later, I am amazed to discover that there really is a Lost City of Atlantis. It was found in 2000 by a team of Swiss and American scientists investigating the Atlantis Massif along the mid-Atlantic ridge. When it appeared in the frame of their remotely controlled camera – named Argo – there was, by all accounts, a certain degree of excitement. The Lost City consisted of a field of white towers: hydrothermal vents, populated by tiny see-through creatures. So did this mean that Plato had been on to something? Was this yet another example of a myth becoming reality, or at least a myth with a core, a kernel, a germ, a grain of truth?

Let’s not get carried away.

more from the LRB here.

Robert Chalmers talks to Vidal on his life and fights, in the Independent.

There can be no modern writer who has disregarded so enthusiastically George Orwell’s egalitarian advice to use an English word unless no alternative is available. Vidal is the only non-restaurateur I’ve ever heard employ the noun amuse-gueule, and the only person in any profession I’ve known who uses “cher confrère” as a verb. When he paces a room at midnight, he doesn’t do so like any run of the mill phantom, but “like Wilde’s Canterville Ghost”.

Gore Vidal gets away with this because of his brilliance, and because unashamed elitism, in matters of class as well as of intellect, has become part of his act. It’s no accident that he gets on so well with Melvyn Bragg, another man of extreme intelligence who for some reason feels compelled to wear his learning, if I can plagiarise Vidal just once, “like a plume”. I ask the American why this might be. “Well,” he says, “I believe Melvyn’s grandmother came from Bury.”

There is no doubting the courage with which Vidal has opposed certain individuals and causes, such as Richard Nixon, Martin Amis and Zionist expansionism. He spoke out against his distant relative Al Gore, when family loyalty might have prevailed, and was one of the very few Americans to understand – if not empathise with – the Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh. The two exchanged correspondence, and Vidal failed to attend McVeigh’s execution in Indiana, in 2001, only because he was given inadequate notice of its rescheduled date. For all that, Vidal is instinctively orthodox in outlook. He may once have declared “I am a political activist”, but in his lexicon this means exercising influence at the highest level of traditional US politics. This explains how, at the height of the acrimonious attacks launched by Hillary Clinton (who has known Vidal for years) against Barack Obama, he continued to support the former, regardless of her tactics. “I feel,” he says, “somewhat paternalistic towards the Clintons.”

To his devotees, Polanyi showed the free market to be the enemy of humanity in “The Great Transformation.” It was an alien form of social organization, he argued, created in 18th-century England only by state action propelled by ideologues. By displacing the natural social state — an idyllic system of mutual obligations that bound and protected individuals — the free market brought inequality, war, oppression, and social turmoil to just and peaceful societies.

“The Great Transformation” has attained the status of a classic in branches of sociology, political science, and anthropology. Stacks of it await undergraduate initiates each year in college bookstores. Citations to the work continue to accumulate in scholarly articles. Yet in economics the work is unknown — or, when discussed, derided. Thus the cruel irony of the term “social sciences.”

more from the NY Sun here.

Over at the Heyman Center, a video of the discussion between Walter Benn Michaels, Charles Altieri, and Amanda Anderson on the issue.

Via The Valve, the IEEE has a special issue on The Singularity.   Ray Kurzweil and Neil Gershenfeld discuss “Two Paths to the Singularity” can be found here. The views of some prominent computer scientists, biologists and all-around smart people such as T.J Rogers, Gordon Moore and Steven Pinker can be found here. Pinker:

WHO HE IS  Professor of psychology at Harvard; previously taught in the department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, with much of his research addressing language development. Writes best sellers about the way the brain works, like The Blank Slate (2002) and The Stuff of Thought (2007).

SINGULARITY WILL OCCUR Never, ever

MACHINE CONSCIOUSNESS WILL OCCUR “In one sense—information routing—they already have. In the other sense—first-person experience—we’ll never know.”

MOORE’S LAW WILL CONTINUE FOR 10 more years

THOUGHTS “There is not the slightest reason to believe in a coming singularity. The fact that you can visualize a future in your imagination is not evidence that it is likely or even possible. Look at domed cities, jet-pack commuting, underwater cities, mile-high buildings, and nuclear-powered automobiles—all staples of futuristic fantasies when I was a child that have never arrived. Sheer processing power is not a pixie dust that magically solves all your problems.”

Over at the Wired blog, a synopsis of the World Science Festival panel:

Marvin Minsky, artificial intelligence pioneer: We do something other species can’t: We remember. We have cultures, ways of transmitting information.

Daniel Dennett, cognitive scientist: We are the first species that represents our reasons, and can reason with each other. “The planet has grown a nervous system,” he said.

Renee Reijo Pera, embryologist: We’re uniquely human from the moment that egg and sperm fuse. A “human program” begins before the brain even begins to form.

Patricia Churchland, neuroethicist: The structure of how the human brain is arranged intrigues me. Are there unique brain structures? As far as we can understand, it’s our size that is unique. What we don’t find are other unique structures. There may be certain types of human-specific cells — but as for what that means, we don’t know. It’s important not only to focus on us, to compare our biology and behavior to other animals.

///
The Outcome
Kit Robinson

When I was a musician’s musician
I used to be a poet’s poet
then a black box

Turned off the alarm system
according to the script
at this time the outcome

Is unknown
and I
am a professor of indeterminacy

In collaboration
with my trusted business partners
the birds

Who inhabit this hillside platform
enduring the confused status
of a forklift upgrade

They sing and I
merely stare at apples
and occasional other fruit

Citrus combine of this belated orchard
in Little Romania
next to where water

Cascades down steps that lead
to something not immediately
identifiable as such

A febrile dog
ripping the hell out of
an inflatable wading pool

Such are the pleasures
of Little Romania
the sky

An unvariegated deadpan blue
the mild undertone of desolation
dusted with erotic chimes

It would be foolish to think
and I have no intention
in keeping with this interoperable crepuscule

We are open
the advent of standards is a boon
hail to the salt in our wounds

We hold these truths
faster than speed
it never entered my mind

Here in midsummer
the day is long
the train sound recoils in the hills

Every bit of mental ice
is used up
in the emotional juice we drink

And words mean nothing
and the movies suck
less than our heart’s desire

More than you ever know

///

From The Washington Post:

Sit. Stay. Read. The dog days of summer are nigh, and here is a big-hearted novel you can fall into, get lost in and finally emerge from reluctantly, a little surprised that the real world went on spinning while you were absorbed.

You haven’t heard of the author. David Wroblewski is a 48-year-old software developer in Colorado, and this is his first novel. It’s being released with the kind of hoopla once reserved for the publishing world’s most established authors. No wonder: The Story of Edgar Sawtelle is an enormous but effortless read, trimmed down to the elements of a captivating story about a mute boy and his dogs. That sets off alarm bells, I know:

Handicapped kids and pets can make a toxic mix of sentimentality. But Wroblewski writes with such grace and energy that Edgar Sawtelle never succumbs to that danger. Inspired improbably by the plot of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” this Midwestern tale manages to be both tender and suspenseful.

The story takes place in a small Wisconsin town where Gar and Trudy Sawtelle happily raise and train their own unusual breed of dogs. The time is the early 1970s, but Wroblewski casts the setting in the sepia tones of an earlier period, as though cut off from the modern age. Their only child is an endearing boy named Edgar, who arrived 14 years ago after a string of miscarriages that almost crushed his mother’s spirit. Edgar cannot speak or make any sounds, but he’s otherwise healthy. To his grateful parents, “it didn’t matter what in him was special and what ordinary. He was alive. . . . Compared to that, silence was nothing.”

More here.

From Scientific American:

In an attempt to duplicate an early cell, scientists put fatty acids (that were likely membrane candidates) and a strip of DNA into a test tube of water. While in there, the fatty acids formed into a ring, or membrane, around the genetic segment. The researchers then added nucleotides—units of genetic material—to the test tube to determine whether they would penetrate the membrane and copy the DNA inside it. Their findings: the nucleotides did enter the cell, latch onto and replicate the DNA over 24 hours.

What scientists now must figure out, Szostak says, is how the original and copycat DNA strands separated and this early cell divided or reproduced.

“We’re trying to solve a whole series of problems, step by step,” he says, “and build up to replicating an evolving system.”

More here.