From The New York Review of Books:

Alexander defeated the Persian armies in three great pitched battles, and the unfortunate Persian king was murdered by his own people. Alexander married an exotic Eastern princess, became King of Kings, and died, not quite thirty-three years old, in Babylon (323 BCE). Some said he died of a particularly violent drinking bout: heavy drinking seems to have been a tradition among the upper class of Macedon, a society by no means famous for its cultural or scholarly interests. News of his death percolated back to Greece. Some refused to believe it. If he were really dead, said one, the whole world would reek of his corpse. But dead he was, and the struggle was on for the succession to his vast realm and fabulous wealth. His generals fought it out, each aiming to keep as much as he could. Alexander’s young son was promptly murdered, and most of his family wiped out. The whole story is a cruel lesson — almost, one might feel, overemphatic in conception — on the vanity of ambition and the nothingness of power.

After a generation of warfare, things settled down. No king had been able to hold on to the whole of Alexander’s empire. Four more or less stable monarchies emerged, among them the Egypt of Ptolemy, a level-headed general, which would last for three hundred years; its last queen was the famous Cleopatra (a Macedonian name). One by one, those kingdoms fell to the rising and irresistible power of Rome. But Alexander lived on, as a figure of fantasy and romance. Sometimes he was a focus for hatred of the Roman conquerors and oppressors. If only Alexander had lived, said many Greeks, he would have conquered these horrible Romans. But Roman writers disagreed: Alexander would have met his match in the sturdy Roman legions!

There is nothing like an early death for creating legends, and Richard Stoneman gives a great many of them learned but lively treatment in his new book.

More here.

///
SWEET APPLES
Albinas Žukauskas

Well, maybe now, towards autumn,
In the dusk, when in my father’s orchard
A giant moon hangs on above the fence,
When from the boughs Newtonian apples plop into the grass –
Maybe you’ll come and ask me,
While I keep watch over the place for apple thieves,
To shake into your lap
Some of the very best sweet apples?
Maybe you’ll come now after all?
I only want to see whether you’re still as stupid
As that time, many years ago,
Whether you still can stay so long behind the orchard fence
Holding a lapful of sweet apples?
I want to see
Whether I am as stupid as I was
So many years ago.
Will I, like then, benumbed and lost in wonder,
Keep staring at you from behind the fence,
Both motionless and speechless,
Pervaded by the blazing giant moon
And by the scent of the sweet apples in your lap?
I want to see
Whether we both will, like two fools,
Stare at each other until midnight,
When you at last come to yourself, stir up
And, lowering your eyes, breathe out:
“My goodness, it is late,
I must be off now… It’s already dark.
And Mummy – God forbid! – will wake to look for me.”
Yet do come, anyway!
I only want to see
Whether we both are still as stupid
As that time, many years ago,
Whether, like then, beside the fence
Under the big full moon
We’ll stare benumbed and speechless
Until the very midnight,
Until the first night cockcrow!

Oh, hang it all!
I’m sorry, dear, I’ve clean forgotten
That the old fence has long since fallen down,
And it’s a long time since you are no more.
All that is left here is the giant moon,
An indistinct scent of sweet apples,
And me, of course,
That’s all.

Translated by Lionginas Pažūsis

//

From The New York Times:

Evolution’s recipe for making a brain more complex has long seemed simple enough. Just increase the number of nerve cells, or neurons, and the interconnections between them. A human brain, for instance, is three times the volume of a chimpanzee’s. A whole new dimension of evolutionary complexity has now emerged from a cross-species study led by Dr. Seth Grant at the Sanger Institute in England. Dr. Grant looked at the interconnections between neurons, known as synapses, which until now have been regarded as a standard feature of neurons.

But in fact the synapses get considerably more complex going up the evolutionary scale, Dr. Grant and colleagues reported online Sunday in Nature Neuroscience. In worms and flies, the synapses mediate simple forms of learning, but in higher animals they are built from a much richer array of protein components and conduct complex learning and pattern recognition, Dr. Grant said. The finding may open a new window into how the brain operates. “One of the biggest questions in neuroscience is to answer what are the design principles by which the human brain is constructed, and this is one of those principles,” Dr. Grant said.

More here.

Kazuhiko Kawahara or Palla. (Composition based on one photograph.)

More on this architect/artist from Osaka here and here.

Don George in National Geographic:

What comes to mind when you hear the word “Ramallah”? Probably not gazelles, white asphodel, and a dinosaur footprint—but those are among the attributes we first meet in this illuminating new book.

Palestinian Walks presents six sarhat—aimless wanderings designed to nourish the soul and rejuvenate the self—taken in the hills around Ramallah and the nearby wadis of the Jerusalem wilderness and the ravines by the Dead Sea from 1978 to 2006. Author and human-rights lawyer Raja Shehadeh has lived in Ramallah his entire life, and his account is imbued with a quiet passion to preserve—in memory if not in fact —this wild landscape that has been increasingly demarcated and developed before his eyes.

The book begins with a transporting walk to his family’s palatial country qasr (stone structure). The scenery in the surrounding hills is wild, unkempt, free. In subsequent chapter-walks, as the years go by, the hills become increasingly hemmed in by Jewish settlements. Where old roads amble along the contours of the land, new highways are blasted straight through; once wide open spaces are covered with concrete buildings. Still, Shehadeh continues to pursue pilgrimages of solace and serenity in the wild hills.

As the natural landscape changes, the contours of Israel–Palestine relations changes as well, and Shehadeh records this evolution too. Initially an idealistic lawyer battling to save what he feels are legitimate Palestinian claims to land, he becomes embittered as case after case is decided against his clients. Honest people disagree profoundly over the history, legitimacies, and injustices in this region. What I love about this book is that it reveals a side of the region that we never hear about; it builds natural and human connections to Ramallah that will forever change what I imagine when I hear the word on TV or read about it in the news.

The other gift of this book is how it illuminates the way landscapes become part of people and help define them. I grew up taking my own New England sarhat in the woods behind my Connecticut home, and now I feel like the rocks, bare fall branches, and green spring buds are a part of me wherever I am.

The sense of love and loss that permeates this poignant book transcends the brambly politics of the region, and Shehadeh’s deeply felt accounts become lessons for us all on the fundamental value of unbridled nature in the landscape of our lives.

//
A Little East of Jordan (59)
Emily Dickinson

A little east of Jordan
Evangelists record,
A gymnast and an angel
Did wrestle long and hard,

Till morning touching mountain—
And Jacob, waxing strong,
The Angel begged permission
To breakfast to return.

“Not so,” said cunning Jacob!
“I will not let thee go
Except thou bless me—Stranger!”
The which acceded to,

Light swung the silver fleeces
“Peniel” hills beyond,
And the bewildered gymnast
Found he had worsted God!

Painting: Jacob Wrestles with an Angel; Rembrandt

//

The German poet, playwright, and critic Friedrich Schiller thought there were two kinds of poets: “sentimental” and “naive” (and neither term, for Schiller, was an insult). Sentimental poets, he said, are self-conscious and retrospective; they “look for lost nature” in the people and things they write about. Their characteristic works, Schiller believed, sound carefully wrought, conclusive, even if written at high speed. Naive poets, on the other hand, seem to “be nature”—poetry seems to come out of them as wind from the sky, or leaves from the trees, as if it were their native speech. Naive poets often sound as if they never revise, even when we know they’ve worked hard on many drafts; their poetry seems to flow and does not want to end.

A.R. Ammons (1926-2001) was in Schiller’s sense the most “naive” of America’s very good poets. His poems, written over nearly 50 years, include almost every kind of speech-act a person can say, from shrugs to prophecies, and they sound spontaneous even when it’s clear they reflect decades of thought.

more from Poetry here.

In form, Human Smoke is unique. Nicholson Baker seeks to tell the story of the origins of World War II through a chronological sequence of several hundred vignettes, as if one were to screen Gone with the Wind through a series of uncaptioned snapshots. Yet however impressionistic Baker’s technique may seem, he is pursuing an ambitious and sweeping reinterpretation of his subject: He evidently regards the “good war” as bad, a colossal mistake. In other words, Baker is tilting against the most deeply settled and ardently embraced piece of conventional wisdom in the current armory of American myth. His prime targets are Prime Minister Winston Churchill, perhaps the most highly touted figure of the past century, and, to a lesser extent, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, though Baker has not forgotten to provide a portrait of Hitler as incomparably worse than either. His heroes are Mohandas K. Gandhi and an assortment of American Quakers and other pacifists who opposed the war—people of whom most readers will be hearing for the first time.

more from Bookforum here.

“Is it true that water or urination would be difficult to fake?” Boliker asks. While Pixar would agree with that sentiment, Palm says that “a lot of things would be possible to fake at this level.” His theory is that VHS recorders were used to cover up the fakery—that the image degradation on the third- or fourth-generation copies sold on street corners and received by the Sun-Times’ Jim DeRogatis was an attempt to hide the cutting and pasting of a digital-effects maestro. Such changes would be easy to spot on the big screen, but much harder to suss out on a crappy video. (Also, while Palm doesn’t protest, Boliker isn’t being fair to him here. He’s not suggesting that the urine on the tape is a special effect. In the Palm scenario, all of the urine on the tape would be real; the fake part would be the head attached to the urinator’s body.)

The week of testimony ends with Kelly’s attorneys finally bidding adieu to the Little Man theory. The new defense premise: the Michael Jordan theory. The classic Gatorade ad showing the young Michael Jordan playing one-on-one against the old Michael Jordan, defense attorney Marc Martin says, reveals the kind of magic you can create by superimposing images. Watch the commercial, though, and you’ll notice that you rarely see the two Jordans’ faces at the same time; when you do, it looks fake. Not to mention that the video is short, cost a ton of money, and doesn’t show young Michael Jordan peeing on old Michael Jordan. I remain unconvinced, and I imagine the jury does as well.

more from Slate here.

From Prospect Magazine:

Strange Fruit: Why Both Sides are Wrong in the Race Debate
by Kenan Malik.

The Great Hall at the University of Reading is a lively piece of Victoriana: a broad neo-Romanesque structure suggestive of a nave, with a concave arched ceiling of gilt-edged rectangular sections painted a pastel green and decorated with rosettes. The uniformity of its architectural style contrasts with the people I can see under its roof. Perhaps 200 students are at work here, and my guess, from their faces, is that between them they could trace their ancestry to Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, the far east and perhaps the Indian subcontinent.

These observations collide with Kenan Malik’s insistence in his new book, Strange Fruit, that there is no such thing as race: that it is nothing more than a social construct, having little to do with biology. It is true that the history of racial thinking is mostly an odious embarrassment. And using the idea of race as an assertion of abrupt or clear genetic boundaries between peoples is wrong. All of humanity shares the same genes, and we can all happily and successfully interbreed. And, contrary to the pronouncements of some well-known public figures, there is no evidence that human groups differ in the genetic factors that cause intelligence or even cognitive abilities in general. But we mustn’t take this to mean that there are no differences among us. Variants of our shared genes do differ among human groups. If my ancestors were from the far east, I would have the epicanthal fold of skin above my eyes so distinctive of peoples from that region. Were I able to trace my ancestry to the Ethiopian highlands, it is likely that I would have a wiry frame and sinewy muscles. And were my ancestors from the Tibetan plateau, it is likely that my body shape would be good at conserving heat. I could go on; and the list could contain far more than morphological characters—just think, for example, of who carries genes to protect against malaria or to digest milk proteins as adults.

More here.

From The New York Times:

WHILE THEY SLEPT by Kathryn Harrison:

The violations that destroy human lives, or maim them, seem to demand telling. Possibly we seek such stories as ways to understand our smaller, more ordinary losses and griefs. Mythology and literature (and their descendant, the Freudian talking cure) manifest a profound hunger for narrating what is called, paradoxically, the unspeakable. Raped, her tongue torn out, Philomela becomes the nightingale, singing the perpetrator’s guilt. When Oedipus appears with bleeding eye-sockets, the tragic chorus simultaneously narrates and says it cannot speak; it looks while saying it must look away:

What madness came upon you, what daemon
Leaped on your life with heavier
Punishment than a mortal man can bear?
No: I cannot even
Look at you, poor ruined one.
And I would speak, question, ponder,
If I were able. No.
You make me shudder.

In the “Inferno” of Dante, Count Ugolino, forced to cannibalize his children’s corpses, is led to narrate the horror by Dante’s offer to retell the story up in the world above. Genesis 19 not only tells the story of incest between Lot and his daughters, but proceeds to name their offspring: Moab and Ben-ammi, and the Moabites and Ammonites descended from them. Abel’s blood “cries out” with its story, and the fratricide Cain is marked.

“Therapeutic” is too mild and cool a word for the telling that rises from such drastic extremes as incest, parricide, fratricide: something like “reconstructive” — as in post-traumatic facial surgery — might be more accurate for such narrative. An eerie, immediate impulse in the direction of storytelling characterizes the thoughts of the terrified 16-year-old Jody Gilley in her upstairs bedroom one night in Medford, Ore., in 1984. Jody is aware that her brother Billy has just clubbed their parents and their younger sister to death with an aluminum baseball bat (though the 11-year-old sister is still breathing).

More here.

How odious! Via Unfogged, from  the Women’s Media Center:

[F]or all of the available examples of fossilized bones, no one in the early world of paleontology had ever discovered a complete and intact fossilized skeleton. This lack of information forced Owen to extrapolate about dinosaurs’ size and shape from examples of teeth, rib bones, and spikes, and to make educated guesses about their position in dinosaurs’ unique morphology. In the late 1840s, Owen commissioned Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, a British artist and amateur scientist, to build the first life-size sculptures of dinosaurs based on speculations by Owen and Gideon Mantell, the British paleontologist who had done the first work on iguanodons. Hawkins created them for the Great Exhibition of 1851 in Hyde Park, and after the close of the exhibition helped to transport them in 1852 to Sydenham, a suburb south of London, where an enlarged version of the Crystal Palace was rebuilt on what became Crystal Palace Park. The dinosaur sculptures were made of iron skeletons and fashioned from bricks and concrete, a hybrid form that evoked both the prefabricated steel-and-glass structures that comprised the original Crystal Palace as well as the brick and mortar of traditional English architecture.

more from Cabinet here.

IN THE Los Angeles Times a few weeks ago, the middlebrow American eclecticist and historian Mark Kurlansky told his readers that a new piece of writing “may be one of the most important books you will ever read”. The work was Human Smoke, by the novelist Nicholson Baker, a factual venture into the origins of the Second World War. Human Smoke, Kurlansky said, demonstrated “that World War II was one of the biggest, most carefully plotted lies in modern history”.

Kurlansky was not talking about Hitler and his various inventions or provocations that permitted him to occupy several neighbouring states. The lies, according to Kurlansky, were told by the leaders of the democracies, especially Roosevelt and Churchill. Baker had shown, “step by step, how an alliance dominated by leaders who were bigoted, far more opposed to communism than to fascism, obsessed with arms sales and itching for a fight coerced the world into war”.

In fact Baker’s book does not “show” or “demonstrate” anything in particular about the causes of the war, consisting, as it does, of hundreds of snippets of speech, diary extracts and single lines from newspaper reports, combined into a chronological narrative.

more from the Sunday Times here.

State lotteries, it’s sometimes said, are a tax on people who don’t understand mathematics. But there is no cause for anyone to feel smug. The brain, no matter how well schooled, is just plain bad at dealing with randomness and probability. Confronted with situations that require an intuitive grasp of the odds, even the best mathematicians and scientists can find themselves floundering.

Suppose you want to calculate the likelihood of tossing two coins and coming up with one head. The great 18th-century mathematician Jean Le Rond d’Alembert thought the answer was obvious: there are three possibilities, zero, one or two heads. So the odds for any one of those happening must be one in three.

But as Leonard Mlodinow explains in “The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives,” there are, in fact, four possible outcomes: heads-heads, heads-tails, tails-heads and tails-tails. So there is a 25 percent chance of throwing zero or two heads and a 50 percent chance of throwing just one. In the long run, anyone offering d’Alembert’s odds in a coin-flipping contest would lose his shirt.

more from the NY Times here.

///
The Hymn of Awakening
Pradodh Parikh

The one who has returned after awakening
Awaking
Flying, drowning, taking leaps, scooping out water from sinking lifeboats
Returned to himself –
What of his awakening?
The one who has returned after awakening
Who has flown after flying, drowned after drowning, leapt after leaping, died after dying,
What of his awakening?
And what of PuPu’s wretched Dada,
Mankind,
and Tiresias knocking his stick?
Who anchored his wisdom at the port of a gypsy town
and returned to himself
wearing knickers from the land of the moon
after digging wells
wearing Nixon’s nose
leaving shops behind
Has flown, jumped, drowned –
What of his awakening?
Praise be to awakening
Praise be to peace
Peace
Let there be peace
Corpulent, bloody and
Fluttering there in a corner.
Peace.
What’s done is done.
Upon all the planets in all the houses
Peace.
But do keep in mind,
The one who has
Returned
After awakening
Drowned after drowning
Leaped after leaping
Died after dying
Awakened after awakening –

What of his awakening?

//

From Nature:

Controlling your anger and reacting sensibly when someone treats you badly can be a problem. And if you have low levels of serotonin, it can be even more of a problem, a new study has found. Molly Crockett at the University of Cambridge, UK, and her colleagues gave volunteers a drink that temporarily lowered their levels of serotonin, a brain ‘neurotransmitter’ linked to happy mood. They then had them play ‘the Ultimatum Game’, which involves accepting or rejecting offers of money. Those with lower serotonin levels showed increased retaliation to offers that they perceived to be unfair. “We’ve suspected for years that there’s a link between serotonin and impulsive aggression and emotional regulation,” says Crockett. “Until this study it wasn’t clear whether serotonin was playing a causal role.”

It has long been known that low serotonin levels are associated with groups of people prone to impulsiveness and problems with emotional control, such as alcoholics, violent criminals and suicide attempters. Low serotonin is also found in clinical conditions such as depression and anxiety.

More here.

From The Guardian:

In 1927, The Good Soldier was reissued as the first volume of a uniform edition of Ford Madox Ford’s works. In a dedicatory letter to Stella Ford, the novelist explained that his “tale of passion” was a true story heard a decade previously from the character he calls Edward Ashburnham, but that he’d needed to wait until all the originals were dead before he could write it. He claimed it as his best book, and asked, uxoriously, that Stella accept not just this work, but “the general dedication of the edition”.

More recently, I was talking to Ian McEwan, who told me that a few years ago he’d been staying in a house with a well-stocked library. There he found a copy of The Good Soldier, which he read and admired greatly. A while later, he wrote On Chesil Beach, that brilliant novella in which passion, and Englishness, and misunderstanding, lead to emotional catastrophe. Only after publishing the book did he realise that he had unconsciously given his two main characters the names Edward (as in Ashburnham) and Florence (as in Dowell). He is quite happy for me to pass this on.

So Ford’s presence, and subterranean influence, continue. He is not so much a writer’s writer (which can suggest hermeticism) as a proper reader’s writer. The Good Soldier needs The Good Reader. It’s true that he isn’t yet being taught to students at Durham University, but there are still 75 years of the allotted 150 for them to get up to speed. And after that, we can start working on Cheltenham, Eton College, and the nation’s tennis-players . . .

More here. (Note: It remains one of my favorite novels since my nephew Asad recommended it to me.)

Jennifer Fisher Wilson in The Smart Set:

Sometimes the smell of body odor means more than just “Wash me!” A person whose sweat starts to smell fruity may have developed diabetes, and an ammonia smell may indicate liver or kidney disease. Odor of rotting fish may signal trimethylaminuria — a rare syndrome caused by a defective gene that prevents people from metabolizing trimethylamine, a natural byproduct of digestion of certain foods like saltwater fish, eggs, and liver.

Body odors have a way of making a lasting impression, even when they don’t signal illness and even when we try ignore them. I’ll never forget the powerful scent emanating from Father Brady, the Irish priest at the church where I grew up. He never looked sweaty, but whenever he would lean over to shake my hand with his own squat, papery one, a smell that made me wrinkle my nose wafted through his robes. My family always joked that we should give him Old Spice for Christmas.

We all emit body odors of some sort, of course, but some of us just cover them up better than others. I must have gone through a particularly stinky stage when, during my early adolescence, my mother took me to the grocery store and showed me where to find Tussy. The spicy-smelling, aqua-colored stick deodorant was the forerunner to Teen Spirit. Apparently, I needed it.

More here.