From The Washington Post:

The more one talks to Michael Ondaatje about the way he writes his novels, the more one is drawn toward a simple, cautionary conclusion:Kids, don’t try this at home. Ask the author of “The English Patient,” “Anil’s Ghost” and the just-published “Divisadero” if he has ever worked from an outline and he bursts out laughing. “I did try once,” he says. “I wrote a kind of treatment.” But this brief stab at planning destroyed his enthusiasm for the material: “So then I said, ‘Now, why would I want to write that?’ “

Many writers start novels without knowing precisely where they’re going. But when it comes to improvisation, Ondaatje is an extreme case. He begins with fragmentary images or situations — a plane crashing in the desert, say, or a bedridden man talking to a nurse — and starts constructing scenes from the fragments. It will be several years before “a kind of approximate draft” materializes. Then comes a prolonged self-editing phase, crucial to Ondaatje’s creative process, which can take two more years. “I move things around,” he has explained, “till they become sharp and clear, till they are in the right location. And it is at this stage that I discover the work’s true voice and structure.”

So he does have an outline. It just doesn’t show up till he’s nearly done.

More here.

Alec Wilkinson in The New Yorker:

October arrived in 1998, and Gordon Bell went paperless, after hearing from a professor at Carnegie Mellon who was engaged in a project to scan a million books and post them online. The professor, a friend of Bell’s named Raj Reddy, had called to ask if he could scan and post Bell’s books, including one on how to start a high-tech business. Bell said, “Of course.” This, by the way, is the Gordon Bell, aged seventy-two, of Microsoft, who has been described as “the Frank Lloyd Wright of computers”; who, at the Digital Equipment Corporation, was among the first engineers to fashion computers into a network; who led the National Science Foundation effort to link the world’s supercomputers—the Internet. The Gordon Bell, incidentally, who believes that one day houses will have no windows, so it won’t matter where they are—screens on the walls will display whatever we want to look at. (Bell would like the screens in his dining room to display the view from a window of the Orient Express; he would also like to hear the train’s sound effects.) The Gordon Bell who, owing to Reddy’s call, and by means of custom programs and gadgets, now collects the daily minutiae of his life so emphatically that he owns the most extensive and unwieldy personal archive of its kind in the world.

More here.

Jonathan Freedland in the New York Review of Books:

One of the few foreign policy achievements of the Bush administration has been the creation of a near consensus among those who study international affairs, a shared view that stretches, however improbably, from Noam Chomsky to Brent Scowcroft, from the antiwar protesters on the streets of San Francisco to the well-upholstered office of former secretary of state James Baker. This new consensus holds that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a calamity, that the presidency of George W. Bush has reduced America’s standing in the world and made the United States less, not more, secure, leaving its enemies emboldened and its friends alienated. Paid-up members of the nation’s foreign policy establishment, those who have held some of the most senior offices in the land, speak in a language once confined to the T-shirts of placard-wielding demonstrators. They rail against deception and dishonesty, imperialism and corruption. The only dispute between them is over the size and depth of the hole into which Bush has led the country he pledged to serve.

More here.

From Top Gear:

Ford Mustang Fastback: bigger than Steve McQueen

Forget all the film-star nonsense, the Mustang Fastback is a star in its own right -though if you’re going to get pedantic, then you need a post-’67 car with the wide front track.

Better still, you should get a ‘GT’ with disc brakes, firmed-up suspension and extra-loud exhaust. Don’t worry that the rear-quarter panel scoops are fake, just enjoy the fact that if you were serious enough, then the ‘Cobra Jet’ versions culminated in the 428Ci GT500KR (or ‘King of the Road’) that produced a not-inconsiderable 500bhp. There are also, apparently, some films that feature this car…

More here.

Calcutta, by all accounts, is changing. The city now calls itself “Kolkata”, reverting to the demotic variant of “Kalikata”, the name of one of the three villages the Muslim Governor of Bengal sold to the East India Company in 1698. The new name has the sanction of the state, but it has to reckon with the stubborn habits of an amphibious culture. The University of Calcutta, set up in 1857, is in Bengali “Kalikata Visvavidyalay”, and the authorities have failed to make room for the new official name in its formal title in both languages. Calcutta is not an ancient city, not at least by Indian standards, and yet one is none too sure of the etymology of its name. The devout like to believe that it derives from the goddess Kali. Pilgrims, they say, had always flocked to Kalighat, the famous temple on the bank of the old river that, after changing course, is now no wider than a moat. It is one of the fifty-two spots over which the body of Sati (a form of Shakti like Kali herself) was scattered, when Vishnu had to dismember the corpse to stop her enraged husband Siva from destroying the world. In some ways, Calcutta strikes outsiders as having been true to its myth of origin. It is in some ways like the orphaned fragment of a lost corpus, forever caught on the hop between imminent ruin and desperate remedy.

more from Eurozine here.

“Why does it always have to be fire?/Why does it always have to be brimstone?” sings Rufus Wainwright on “Do I Disappoint You”, the opening track of the Canadian-American songwriter’s first comprehensive assault on the mainstream. If it is always high drama round Rufus’s way, that is because he encourages it, packing both his life and his music with unabashed pomp and theatrical flourishes.

Currently composing an opera for the New York Met, the 33-year-old also recently performed an acclaimed tribute show to the gay icon Judy Garland. He has appeared on his album sleeves dressed as a pre-Raphaelite maiden, and now here he is in hilariously camp monogrammed lederhosen. The over-egging of puddings rarely ceases.

more from The New Statesman here.

Translation is an imperfect art – even an impossible one. That is the truism. But it would be a very eccentric devotee of literature who for lack of Greek or Russian refused to read Homer or Tolstoy. Lyric poetry is more challenging to the translator than narrative literature is, since little can be separated out from the choice of specific words, their sounds, rhythms and associations, to say nothing of poetic form and the elaborations of syntax. That is why there are lyric poets of the first rank – Goethe and Pushkin are prime examples – whose poems are not as well known in Britain as their fame might lead us to expect. Nevertheless, most good poets attempt translation in the course of a life’s work and serious readers of poetry will want to have some familiarity with, let us say, Catullus or Baudelaire. There are those who claim, moreover, that poetry is essentially metamorphic – a process that includes negotiations with other texts and the transformation of experience into language, rhythm and form. To such a conception of poetry, the act of verse translation is fundamental.

more from the TLS here.

In American Scientist, Margaret Jacob’s reviews Peter Dear’s The Intelligibility of Nature: How Science Makes Sense of the World:

Why are science’s instrumental techniques effective? The usual answer is: by virtue of science’s (true) natural philosophy. How is science’s natural philosophy shown to be true, or at least likely? The answer: by virtue of science’s (effective) instrumental capabilities. Such is the belief, amounting to an ideology, by which science is understood in modern culture. It is circular, but invisibly so.

Readers are apparently expected to conclude that, although other disciplines that accumulate knowledge display many factors that explain their relative effectiveness or success, science alone is solely about theories and methods of inquiry. Truth or lesser falsity cannot explain science’s success, nor can the replication of experimental methods and results. And the historical circumstances, or context, that may have shaped the science are also irrelevant.

Let’s see how this approach works for the history of 17th-century science. Once, when Aristotle held sway, natural philosophy was seen as distantly related to instrumentality and superior to it. Gradually, thanks to Bacon, Descartes and especially Newton, “doing things and understanding things . . . became increasingly folded into one another.” The resulting ideas we have today about nature “are all shaped by our acceptance of the images of reality that we owe to science in its guise as natural philosophy.” If we assign intelligibility to the world, it is because science has “powerful social authority . . ., which serves to render most people unable to refuse a knowledge-claim presented as a ‘scientific fact.'”

In the BBC’s Doha Debates, Norman Finkelstein and Andrew Cockburn vs. Martin Indyk and David Aaronovitch on the “Israel lobby” and criticism of Israel.

At the latest Doha Debate held at the prestigious Oxford Union in the United Kingdom on May 1st, two-thirds of the student audience approved a motion claiming that Israel’s supporters are stifling Western debate about Israel’s actions.

The event at the world famous debating society of Oxford University marked the first time the Doha Debates have been held outside Qatar.

The Debate took place amid mounting controversy over the role of the pro-Israel lobby in the United States and accusations that it has suppressed criticism of Israel – a charge that the lobby vigorously denies.

In Dissent:

[Jon Wiener of Dissent]: The biggest obstacle in any peace settlement, according to the Israelis, is the Palestinian claim of a right of return. In 1948 your mother’s family was expelled from land that had been theirs for generations. What do you tell your Palestinian comrades about the right of return?

[Sari Nusseibeh]: This is the most painful part of a compromise that has to be made between Israelis and Palestinians. We have to think not only of the past but also of the future. I’ve been accused of arguing that we don’t have a right of return. That is false. I think we have a right of return. But we have other rights as well. We have a right to freedom. We have a right to independence. We have a right to create a new future. And very often in life the implementation of one right conflicts with the ability to implement another. You have to make a choice. In this case, I’ve been arguing with my peers, my colleagues, my people, that we must choose, and that, morally speaking, the best choice is to opt for the right to freedom, the right to independence, and the right to a new future.

From The Harvard Gazette:

Researchers at Harvard and Princeton universities have taken a crucial step toward building biological computers, tiny implantable devices that can monitor the activities and characteristics of human cells. The information provided by these “molecular doctors,” constructed entirely of DNA, RNA, and proteins, could eventually revolutionize medicine by directing therapies only to diseased cells or tissues.

Evaluating Boolean logic equations inside cells, these molecular automata will detect anything from the presence of a mutated gene to the activity of genes within the cell. The biocomputers’ “input” is RNA, proteins and chemicals found in the cytoplasm; “output” molecules indicating the presence of the telltale signals are easily discernable with basic laboratory equipment. Benenson and his colleagues demonstrate in their Nature Biotechnology paper that biocomputers can work in human kidney cells in a culture.

More here.

Michael Dirda in The Washington Post:

FATHERS AND SONS: The Autobiography of a Family By Alexander Waugh

For more than three generations the Waughs have been extremely prominent literary figures in Great Britain. Arthur Waugh oversaw Chapman and Hall (publishers of Dickens, among others); both his sons, Alec and Evelyn, became well-known writers, the latter arguably the leading English novelist of the century; and one of Evelyn’s many offspring, Auberon, was long reviled and revered for his no-holds-barred, fiercely scathing and very funny political and social journalism. The author of this memoir, Alexander Waugh, is Auberon’s son, and he has already thrown in with the family business by bringing out works bearing such ambitious (and perhaps slightly ludicrous) titles as Time and God. He tells us, in passing, that nine of Arthur Waugh’s descendants have already produced 180 books.

More here.

We were lucky enough to have Forro in the Dark play at our 1st Annual 3QD party a couple of years ago. The band was formed by our old friend (and brilliant percussionist) Mauro Refosco during an impromptu jam session on his birthday some years ago. Those of you who have seen them perform live know how truly amazing they are. The rest of you should really try to catch them somewhere in the US or Europe during their tour this summer. Get more information about dates in different cities here. They often have amazing guest musicians, for example, here David Byrne plays with them (although this video fails to give a good sense of how transporting their music is):

And you can see a video of them playing live in NYC here.

The Rushdies of today find themselves under criticism, compared unfavorably in the press with the Islamist philosopher who writes prefaces for the collected fatwas of Sheik al-Qaradawi, the theologian of the human bomb. Today the menace to society is declared to be Hirsi Ali and people of similar minds, of whom there are quite a few: John Stuart Mill’s Muslim admirers, who are said to be just as fanatical as the fanatics. During the Rushdie affair, courage was saluted. Today it is likened to fascism.

How did this happen? The equanimity on the part of some well-known intellectuals and journalists in the face of Islamist death threats so numerous as to constitute a campaign; the equanimity in regard to stoning women to death; the journalistic inability even to acknowledge that women’s rights have been at stake in the debates over Islamism; the inability to recall the problems faced by Muslim women in European hospitals; the inability to acknowledge how large has been the role of a revived anti-Semitism; the striking number of errors of understanding and even of fact that have entered into the journalistic presentations of Tariq Ramadan and his ideas; the refusal to discuss with any frankness the role of Ramadan’s family over the years; the accidental endorsement in the Guardian of the great-uncle who finds something admirable in the September 11 attacks–what can possibly account for this string of bumbles, timidities, gaffes, omissions, miscomprehensions, and slanders?

Two developments account for it. The first development is the unimaginable rise of Islamism since the time of the Rushdie fatwa. The second is terrorism.

more from TNR here.

Modern Western Civilization presents us with a Janus-like face: On one side Renaissance Humanism which begins in Italy in the 14th century with Petrarch, on the other side Enlightenment Rationalism which begins in France in the 17th century with Descartes.

After Descartes, there is a dangerous tendency to separate the two cultural phenomena and consider Humanism either anachronistic, or superseded. The inevitable result has been sheer confusion in the area of cultural identity; consequently, at this critical juncture of the new polity called European Union, there is talk of a “democratic deficit,” that democracy that is integral part of Western Civilization.

We are in urgent need of cultural guides to show us how to better harmonize the two above mentioned phenomena. One such guide is Emmanuel Lévinas’ humanistic philosophy. In as much as it challenges the Western rationalistic philosophical tradition, it is extremely important for the emergence of a renewed European cultural identity. It explores in depth the threats to the authentic cultural identity of Europe, how modalities of thinking powerfully affect other ideas and shape a whole cultural milieu, sometimes with less than desirable consequences.

more from Ovi Magazine here.

When you think of a high-society dance in the England of the 1770s, for example, this passage in Tobias Smollett’s 1771 novel, “The Expedition of Humphry Clinker,” probably isn’t what you have in mind: “Imagine to yourself a high exalted essence of mingled odours, arising from putrid gums, imposthumated lungs, sour flatulencies, rank armpits, sweating feet, running sores and issues…besides a thousand frowzy streams, which I could not analyse.” Though the description is lightly fictionalized, Cockayne says, odor-wise it’s dead-on.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

From Nature:

Breast cancer — which will affect about one in every nine women in Britain and the United States — is known to have a strong genetic influence. But until now, known genes could account for only about a quarter of the genetic component of cancer risk. To search for some of the many other genes thought to make small differences to a woman’s breast-cancer risk, Easton and his colleagues compared the genomes of some 4,400 women with breast cancer with those of about 4,300 who did not have the disease.

They identified 30 differences in single DNA bases that seemed to be linked to the disease. These were then compared in more than 20,000 women with breast cancer and in a similar number of controls. The results are reported in Nature. Three of the newly discovered genes are involved in controlling the growth of cells. The gene with the strongest association was fibroblast growth factor receptor 2, or FGFR2. Women who have two copies of the high-risk version of this gene — about 16% of the population — have a 60% greater chance of developing breast cancer than do those with no copies of the gene, Easton and his colleagues found.

More here.

From The New York Times:

The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph From the Frontiers of Brain Science. By Norman Doidge

An amputee has a bizarre itch in his missing hand: unscratchable, it torments him. A neuroscientist finds that the brain cells that once received input from the hand are now devoted to the man’s face; a good scratch on the cheek relieves the itch. Another amputee has 10 years of excruciating “phantom” pain in his missing elbow. When he puts his good arm into a box lined with mirrors he seems to recognize his missing arm, and he can finally stretch the cramped elbow out. Within a month his brain reorganizes its damaged circuits, and the illusion of the arm and its pain vanish.

Research into the malleability of the normal brain has been no less amazing. Subjects who learn to play a sequence of notes on the piano develop characteristic changes in the brain’s electric activity; when other subjects sit in front of a piano and just think about playing the same notes, the same changes occur. It is the virtual made real, a solid quantification of the power of thought. From this still relatively primitive experimental data, theories can be constructed for the entirety of human experience: creativity and love, addiction and obsession, anger and grief — all, presumably, are the products of distinct electrical associations that may be manipulated by the brain itself, and by the brains of others, for better or worse.

More here.

John Leo in City Journal:

So how should we write and restore the integrity of good English? Candor, clarity and sincerity are important keys. All of us are weary of writers who dance around their subjects, protecting friends, bending facts to push a cause. “The great enemy of clear language is insincerity,” Orwell wrote. “When there is a gap between one’s real and declared aims, one turns instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms.”

Further, our minds are clogged with the clichés, idioms, and rhythms of other people, and we have to work to avoid them. Paul Johnson says, “Most people when they write, including most professional writers, tend to slip into seeing events through the eyes of others because they inherit stale expressions and combinations of words, threadbare metaphors, clichés and literary conceits. This is particularly true of journalists.”

Kurt Vonnegut has said that a writer’s natural style will almost always be drawn from the speech he heard as a child. Vonnegut grew up in Indiana, where, he said, “common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin.” He wrote: “I myself find I trust my own writing most and other people seem to trust it most, when I sound most like a person from Indianapolis, which is what I am.”

More here.

From The New Yorker:

In 1943, when I was a fifteen-year-old schoolboy in Danzig, I volunteered for active duty. When? Why? Since I do not know the exact date and cannot recall the by then unstable climate of the war, or list its hot spots from the Arctic to the Caucasus, all I can do for now is string together the circumstances that probably triggered and nourished my decision to enlist. No mitigating epithets allowed. What I did cannot be put down to youthful folly. No pressure from above. Nor did I feel the need to assuage a sense of guilt, at, say, doubting the Führer’s infallibility, with my zeal to volunteer.

It happened while I was serving in the Luftwaffe auxiliary—a force made up of boys too young to be conscripts, who were deployed to defend Germany in its air war. The service was not voluntary but compulsory then for boys of my age, though we experienced it as a liberation from our school routine and accepted its not very taxing drills. Rabidly pubescent, we considered ourselves the mainstays of the home front. The Kaiserhafen battery became our second home. At first there were attempts to keep school going, but, as classes were too often interrupted by field exercises, the mostly frail, elderly teachers refused to travel the wearisome dirt road to our battery.

More here.