INTERVIEWER What was your next obsession, after detective stories?

ISHIGURO
Rock music. After Sherlock Holmes, I stopped reading until my early twenties. But I’d played the piano since I was five. I started playing the guitar when I was fifteen, and I started listening to pop records—pretty awful pop records—when I was about eleven. I thought they were wonderful. The first record that I really liked was Tom Jones singing “The Green, Green Grass of Home.” Tom Jones is a Welshman, but “The Green, Green Grass of Home” is a cowboy song. He was singing songs about the cowboy world I knew from TV.
I had a miniature Sony reel-to-reel that my father brought me from Japan, and I would tape directly from the speaker of the radio, an early form of downloading music. I would try to work out the words from this very bad recording with buzzes. Then when I was thirteen, I bought John Wesley Harding, which was my first Dylan album, right when it came out.

more from The Paris Review here.

Olafur Eliasson, the Danish-Icelandic inventor and engineer of minimalist spectacle, is so much better than anyone else in today’s ranks of crowd-pleasing installational artists that there should be a nice, clean, special word other than “art” for what he does, to set him apart. There won’t be. “Art” has become the promiscuous catchall for anything artificial that meets no practical need but which we like, or are presumed or supposed to like. Still, play with the thought at “Take Your Time,” the Eliasson retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art and at MOMA’s affiliate, P.S. 1. By the way, please make the P.S. 1 trek—three stops on the No. 7 train from Grand Central. That part of the show details and deepens a sense of Eliasson’s creative integrity, which may remain slightly in question amid his stunts on West Fifty-third Street: an electric fan swaying on a cord from the ceiling of the atrium, rooms awash in different kinds of peculiarly colored light, a wall of exotic (and odorous) moss, a curtain of falling water optically immobilized by stroboscopic flashes. I had a little epiphany in Queens while looking at Eliasson’s contemplative suites of photographs of Icelandic landscapes, seascapes, glaciers, icebergs, and caves: here’s someone for whom beauty is normal. His character suggests both the mental discipline of a scientist and the emotional responsibility of a poet. If leadership in public-spirited art extravaganzas were a political office—and it sometimes feels as if it were—he’d have my vote.

more from The New Yorker here.

TO SOME DEVELOPMENT economists, the world can be boiled down this simply: There are rich countries that keep getting richer, and there are poor countries that seem destined to grow poorer. And then, there is Africa.

For every symptom of Africa’s relentless underdevelopment, there is a theory about its root causes. Colonialism, the Cold War, climate change, ethnic warfare, the choking off of technology – they all rank high on the list of ills and crimes perpetrated on this continent in the last century. But underneath all those, many scholars have long sensed that to answer the two most nagging questions about Africa – How do we fix it? And how did it break? – you have to go much farther back in time. All the way to African slavery.

Sensing it is one thing. Proving it is another. Could there be a direct, quantifiable link between the African countries most ravaged by slavery and those that are the most underdeveloped today? And if there were such a link, could it be measured?

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

[Thanks to Pete Chapman.]

From Nature:

A team led by Elaine Holmes and Ruey Leng Loo of Imperial College London took advantage of an older epidemiological study on diet and blood pressure that collected urine samples from 4,680 people between 1997 and 1999. These samples were analysed, and the results published in 2003, then preserved with boric acid and kept frozen. The research team were able to do with most of the samples something not possible in the original study: identify all the chemical compounds in the urine, using an analytical technique called proton nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. The method produces a graph with thousands of peaks, each of which corresponds to a different metabolite, the compounds left over after the body is done digesting food. The researchers then compared these graphs across the 17 populations of subjects, who came from China, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States. “Of the thousands of peaks, we find the 20, 30 or 40 that are different” from each other, says team member Jeremy Nicholson, also from Imperial College.

“What our study really shows is how incredibly metabolically diverse people are around the world,” says Nicholson. “British and American [metabolomes] are nearly identical. Japanese and Chinese people are totally different metabolically even though they are nearly identical genetically.” People who lived in Hawaii had metabolomes equally similar to those of people on the mainland United States and in Japan. Interestingly, Nicholson says, the biggest difference between the 17 groups was between people from South China and everyone else. “They have a very different and much broader range of diet,” he says. “Very broadly speaking, the southern Chinese are the healthiest and the people in southern Texas are least healthy.”

More here.

From The New York Times:

At Harvard, the social psychologist Daniel Gilbert is known as Professor Happiness. That is because the 50-year-old researcher directs a laboratory studying the nature of human happiness. Dr. Gilbert’s “Stumbling on Happiness” was a New York Times paperback best seller for 23 weeks and won the 2007 Royal Society Prize for Science Books.

Q. HOW DID YOU STUMBLE ONTO YOUR AREA OF STUDY?

A. It was something that happened to me roughly 13 years ago. I spent the first decade of my career studying what psychologists call “the fundamental attribution error,” which is about how people have the tendency to ignore the power of external situations to determine human behavior.

Why do many people, for instance, believe the uneducated are stupid? I’d have been content to work on this for many more years, but some things happened in my own life. Within a short period of time, my mentor passed away, my mother died, my marriage fell apart and my teenage son developed problems in school. What I soon found was that as bad as my situation was, it wasn’t devastating. I went on.

One day, I had lunch with a friend who was also going through difficult times. I told him: “If you’d have asked me a year ago how I’d deal with all this, I’d have predicted that I couldn’t get out of bed in the morning.” He nodded and added, “Are we the only people who could be so wrong in predicting how we’d respond to extreme stress?” That got me thinking. I wondered: How accurately do people predict their emotional reactions to future events?

More here.

///

Horizon
Billy Collins

You can use the brush of a Japanese monk
or a pencil stub from a race track.

As long as you draw the line a third
the way up from the bottom of the page,

the effect is the same; the world suddenly
divided into its elemental realms.

A moment ago there was only a piece of paper.
Now there is earth and sky, and sky and sea.

You were sitting alone in a small room.
Now your are walking into the heart of a vast desert

or standing on the ledge of a winter beach
watching the light on the water, light in the air.

///

Sebastiao Salgado. Valdes Peninsula, Patagonia, Argentina. 2004.

Photograph.

More on this master photographer here, here and here.

,,,
Before the Ink Dries
Jim Culleny

When suits enter the woods
the animals flee.

When Pradas plod the undergrowth
not even the king of the jungle is safe.
Lions become lambs
and lambs, lamb chops.

When the scent of Brooks Brothers
wafts through primal domains
even 800 lb gorillas take a hike
like pipsqueak squirrels
who can smell death
at distances of light years.
They scurry into shadows
at the glint of cufflinks.

All forest creatures know
that a man in a tie may be
more vicious than a werewolf
at full moon or a great white
off Coney Island in high-sweat July.

Beware the lapel, the mother bear
warns her cubs. Lapels frame the heads
of mighty predators like necklaces
of skulls and tiger’s teeth
and silk hankies that peek
from breast pockets are no less than
the marks of Cain.

The spear-pens of bankers may pierce
the heart of a wilderness
more deeply than the bronze tips
of fierce Greeks pierced the heart of Troy.

Once they’re hurled a wilderness dies
a sure death before the ink dries.

,,,

Why can’t we have comment discussions like this?

[H/t: Maeve Adams]

Sara Dickerman in Slate:

As an industry, we rhapsodize about la cucina povera—that is, “poor food” like polenta, beans, and braise-worthy cuts of meat like short-ribs and pigs trotters—but we rarely talk about cooking in terms of dollars and cents. When food writers and producers advocate economy, they’re usually talking about time—churning out recipes for fast, easy, everyday weeknight meals that can be prepared in minutes. The dollar-savvy recipe is far less common. Why, even as the economic news turns grim, is it so unusual for the food media to take cost into account?

In part, it’s because we assume our readers are looking for a window into the epicurean life, not a mirror of their own kitchens. And, of course, there is the subtle or not-so-subtle pressure to sell advertisers’ expensive food products, travel packages, and restaurants. But a big factor, I think, is an aesthetic concern—a fear of taking the hectoring tone of the much-maligned home economist.

Over at Princeton University Press, Chapter 1 of Larry Bartels Unequal Democracy:

While economists have spent a good deal of scholarly energy describing and attempting to explain the striking escalation of economic in equality in the United States over the past 30 years, they have paid remarkably little attention to social and political factors of the sort cited by Krugman. For example, one comprehensive summary of the complex literature on earnings in equality attempted to ascertain “What shifts in demand, shifts in supply, and/or changes in wage setting institutions are responsible for the observed trend?” The authors pointed to “the entry into the labor market of the well educated baby boom generation” and “a long- term trend toward increasing relative demand for highly skilled workers” as important causal factors. Their closest approach to a political explanation was a passing reference to a finding that “the 25 percent decline in the value of the minimum wage between 1980 and 1988 accounts for a small part of the drop in the relative wages of dropouts during the 1980s.”

It probably should not be surprising, in light of their scholarly expertise and interests, that economists have tended to focus much less attention on potential political explanations for escalating economic in equality than on potential economic explanations. In a presidential address to the Royal Economic Society, British economist A. B. Atkinson criticized his colleagues’ tendency to ignore or downplay the impact on the income distribution of social and political factors, arguing that “we need to go beyond purely economic explanations and to look for an explanation in the theory of public choice, or ‘political economy’. We have to study the behaviour of the government, or its agencies, in determining the level and coverage of state benefits.”

In 1977, the long-unknown, just-published Hungarian novelist Imre Kertész released a slim double volume, containing the novellas “Detective Story” and “The Pathseeker,” a translation of which has just been published in its own volume (Melville House, 126 pages, $13). Mr. Kertész would go on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002, in large part for his trilogy of “Fatelessness,” “The Failure,” and “Kaddish for a Child Unborn.” For an artist by his own admission incapable of thinking or writing about anything except Auschwitz, these two early works seem anomalous. “Detective Story” recounts insidious political brutality in an unnamed Latin American country, while “The Pathseeker” tells of a frustrated journey toward a hidden goal in an anonymous landscape (albeit one recognizable as somewhere in Central Europe). Slender though it is, “The Pathseeker” is a necessary addition to Mr. Kertész’s work in English, and should occasion thanks to both the novelist and his translator, Tim Wilkinson, who has rendered Mr. Kertész’s (famously difficult) Hungarian into a flowing, able English — as well as to Melville House’s fascinating “The Contemporary Art of the Novella” series, which rubric “The Pathseeker” falls under.

more from the NY Sun here.

Loury and McWhorter have a smart discussion on Obama, Clinton, “bittergate”, and the last debate.  Loury makes a  good, if not fully convincing, case for Hillary Clinton:

One may make a distinction between two types of novel: the self-enclosed and the open. The distinction is not absolute. Such things never are. Genre fiction may merge with what is called the literary novel, for instance. Still the categories I have in mind are useful, or at least interesting. By the self-enclosed novel, I mean one which makes no reference — or almost no reference — to anything beyond itself. It belongs to its age of course, but it does not appear to be set in time. Time naturally passes, as it must in a narrative, but there is no suggestion that events in the world of fact beyond the novel might impinge on its characters, influence their behaviour, or affect the course of their lives. The doors of the novel are closed against the winds of the world.

In the open novel, these winds, which are the winds of history, beat upon the characters. Indeed history is itself a character in this kind of novel, even if the author chooses not to introduce real-life historical figures.

more from The Spectator here.

The new issue of frieze is devoted to the question of reality in the age of aesthetics.  Mark Nash on the topic:

Much has been written, some of it by me, on the ‘documentary turn’ in contemporary art. We can trace this development back both to major international exhibitions such as documenta 11 in 2002 (of which I was a co-curator) and to exhibitions focusing more specifically on artists’ work with moving images, such as ‘Experiments with Truth’, which I curated at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia in 2004–5. Exhibitions such as these sought, among other things, to explore a range of artistic practices that, in one way or another, attempted a connection with social and political reality. Current shows such as ‘Come and Go: Fiction and Reality’ at the Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, and ‘The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality, and the Moving Image, Part 1: Dreams; Part 2: Realisms’, at the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C., are evidence of the continuing resonance of these issues.

This issue of frieze seeks to explore artists’ increasing involvement with documentary by invoking the notion of artistic agency as one in which the artist, in one way or another, crosses back and forth between the domains of reality and fiction. Rather than being faced with a choice, the artist solves the problem of this relationship through his or her activity of ‘border crossing’. ‘What does it mean’, asked the editors in their brief to me for this piece, ‘when an artist creates a scenario that partly relies on existing social realities, or when they actively enter that social reality to generate work?’

The name René Descartes will forever be entwined with our hopes and fears about the technological project. While it was Francis Bacon who originated the idea of conquering nature for the sake of relieving man’s estate, it was Descartes who told us we might truly become “like masters and possessors of nature”; Descartes who gave us the mathematical physics that has proven to be the indispensable instrument of modern science; and Descartes who foresaw that the ultimate instrument of the Baconian project would have to be medicine, since health is the primary good of life and the foundation of all other goods. The technological project was from the start biotechnological—in intent if not in realized practice—and it is hard not to think of today’s “transhumanists” when we read Descartes’ quasi-promise that technology might spare us even the “enfeeblement of old age.”

But the mastery and possession of nature is not the only, perhaps not even the deepest, theme of Descartes’ thought. We find in Descartes, and especially in his epoch-making Discourse on Method, a reflectiveness about what it means to be human and about the political conditions of his own activity that far outstrips the reflections we find in the contemporary heirs of his rhetoric, or indeed even what Descartes claims to learn from his own science. No mere scientist could have written the Discourse on Method or could help us understand the full depth of its complex message—and particularly its political and social message.

more from The New Atlantis here.

Speaking of languages, Steve Chawkins in the LA Times:

At a lavish event in the Chumash casino’s concert hall Friday night, most of the tribe’s 150 enrolled members lined up for copies of the long-awaited 608-page book [the first Samala dictionary].

“This is awesome,” said Nakia Zavalla, the 33-year-old cultural director for the Santa Ynez band of the Chumash, handling the volume as gingerly as a sacred text. “We won’t have to constantly go searching for our culture — now it’s right here.”

The dictionary’s 4,000 entries sound as foreign to most of the tribe members as they were familiar to their ancestors. It’s a tough language for English speakers, filled with sharp interruptions called glottal stops. Some words don’t quite roll off the tongue — qalpsik is to braid the hair tight — and more than 100 prefixes can dramatically change the meaning of verbs.

“There are so many rules,” moaned Zavalla. “Just a glottal stop — it sounds like uh-oh — can change the meaning of ma from ‘the’ to ‘rabbit.’

The last Chumash fluent in the language died in 1965. For years, speaking Samala carried a stigma, even on the reservation. At the American Indian boarding schools attended by students in past generations, use of native tongues was a punishable offense, a serious violation in an environment that aimed to minimize the value of being Indian.

More recently, some parents saw the language as a needless burden for their children — a reminder of an identity it sometimes seemed better to hide.

Mark Liberman has a couple of fascinating recent posts on comparing the vocabulary and on comparing the efficiency of different languages, over at Language Log:

Alex Baumans described a bilingual magazine’s problems in equalizing space and word-count allocations between Dutch and French…Alex’s discussion of Dutch compounds underlines a point that I made in the earlier post, namely that spaces are not a very helpful way to define the boundaries of words, especially in comparisons across languages. But what I’d like to follow up on today is his observation about comparisons of word and character counts.

As discussed in a post a few years ago (“One world, how many bytes?”, 8/5/2005), based on a variety of large collections of English-Chinese parallel texts, English texts are larger than their Chinese counterparts by a factor of between 1.37 and 2.27 before compression, or 1.19 to 1.41 after compression.

My impression is that there are several different factors at work here — but they don’t seem to me to account fully for the differences in length, especially in comparing compressed texts.

”’

“Wait a minute. What did you just say? You’re predicting $4-a-gallon gas?
… That’s interesting. I hadn’t heard that.”
–the President of the United States, Washington, D.C., Feb. 28, 2008

…

After Su Tung P’o
Heather McHugh

On The Birth of a Son

When a child is born, the parents say

they hope it’s healthy and intelligent. But as for me—

..

well, vigor and intelligence have wrecked my life. I pray

this baby we are seeing walloped, wiped and winningly anointed,

..

turns out dumb as oakum—and more sinister.

That way he can crown a tranquil life by being appointed

a cabinet minister.

…