From Rain Taxi Review of Books:

In taking up the latest in a given author’s sequence of novels, I am too often instructed by jacket copy that the book in my hands may be thoroughly enjoyed entirely on its own. It isn’t true, nor should it be. Time is real in every direction, and as Robert Creeley was beautifully inclined to say, “I want to take the whole trip.”

If there is any trip sublimely worth the taking in contemporary fiction, it is Gerard Woodward’s three novel sequence — August, I’ll Go to Bed at Noon, A Curious Earth — concerning the catastrophes, the outrages, the angelic goofiness and visionary transfigurations of Aldous and Colette Jones and family. On the day I finished my first reading of August, I sent out a blizzard of e-mails and postcards to friends and acquaintances announcing that we now had, over in England, a novelist writing prose the way William Blake would be writing it if he owned a bicycle. (August opens with an Englishman’s bicycle accident in Wales; Aldous literally tumbles out of 1950’s London and into the pastoral — a dairy farmer’s field, or perhaps a Samuel Palmer painting, which soon becomes his family’s annual campsite and second home.) Having just completed my first reading of A Curious Earth, I can, with the deepest conviction, avow what Blake avowed in his letter to Thomas Butts, 22nd November 1802: “My enthusiasm is still what it was, only enlarged and confirmed.”

More here.

From Nature:

Three independent genetic studies have found some of the strongest evidence yet that your genes influence your risk of developing lung cancer. Lung cancer, the most common killer cancer in the world, is largely caused by smoking. Tobacco is thought to be responsible for about 5 million premature deaths every year and smoking is still clearly the largest risk factor. But the new results suggest that, amongst smokers, some people may be as much as 80% more at risk than others thanks to their genes.

By scanning the entire genomes of lung-cancer patients and healthy controls, the three research teams all identified a region on chromosome 15 that seems to influence the likelihood of developing cancer. People possessing a certain set of mutations at this genetic location are more likely than others to have the disease.

More here.

What if, for once, we did not credit Richard Price with having a “wonderful ear for dialogue”? What if we praised his wonderful mind for dialogue instead? An “ear” for dialogue always seems to imply reportorial or stenographic prowess, the writer sitting in a bar or a bus, studiously agog for the modern mot. Henry Green, the author of perhaps the greatest English novel of dialogue, “Loving,” a book written almost entirely in the speech of Cockney servants, insisted that his job was to create, “in the mind of the reader, life which is not, and which is non-representational.”

And, indeed, one would have to get very drunk or ride on a magic bus to hear the kinds of anarchic metaphor, wild figuration, mashed slang, and frequent poetry that Richard Price creates on the page. Some parts of society may speak more pungently than others, but our usual conversation is closer to Charles Bovary’s than we might like—a sidewalk on which everyone else’s opinions and phrases have walked. Actual speech tends to be dribblingly repetitive, and relatively nonfigurative, nonpictorial. Price, by contrast, awards his characters great figurative powers, endows them with an ability to take everyone’s clichés and customize them into something gleaming and fresh. His new novel, “Lush Life” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $26), which is filled with page after page of vital speech, shows him inventing a life for dialogue rather than just taking it from life; and this spoken magic is often indistinguishable from Price’s apparently more formal, descriptive prose.

more from The New Yorker here.

Schjeldahl is most engaging when he’s ambivalent. His reviews’ typical format of first impressions, biographical capsule, smattering of social history, detailed analysis of the exhibited work, and general evaluation of the artist’s career leaves plenty of room for information and interpretations at cross-purposes. His mixed opinion of Paul Gauguin’s art combines a careful examination of Gauguin’s paintings with compact discussions of the artist’s life, colonialism, the early avant-garde, and the role of museums and collectors. Schjeldahl’s feel for living with contradictions provides his writing with both its depth and its surface appeal—that and its seductively pellucid phrasing. It involves his ability to admit mistakes and change his mind, whether from negative to positive (overturning prior dismissals of Philip Guston’s “hood” paintings and of Currin’s work) or from enthusiastic to worshipful (Velázquez). While the politics underlying his opinions can get murky, his aesthetic likes and dislikes are easy enough to discern along a spectrum ranging from the gush (Vija Celmins) to the sneer (Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Central Park public-art project The Gates).

more from Bookforum here.

I’m hardly a fan of John Bolton, but his animus towards the UN Human Rights Council is something I share.  From Reuters (via normblog):

International activist groups accused the United Nations Human Rights Council on Monday of acting as a cover for Islamic and other countries aiming to restrict free speech.

The 47-nation Council passed resolutions on Friday imposing new instructions for its investigator on freedom of expression which non-governmental organisations (NGOs) said bowed too far to concerns about defamation of Islam, which have flared again with a Dutch lawmaker’s film on the Islamic holy book the Koran.

Instead of defending human rights around the world, the Paris-based Reporters Without Borders said, the U.N. body was focusing on limiting criticism of state and religious interests.

“All of the Council’s decisions are nowadays determined by the interests of Muslim countries or powerful states such as China or Russia that know how to surround themselves with allies,” the group said.

And the India and Britain-based International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) said the Council “stands exposed as no longer capable of fulfilling its central role: the promotion and protection of human rights.”

My dear friends Jessie Morgan Owens and James Owens have launched a new blog.  They’re travel photographers by profession, and were chosen this year by PDN as one, er two, of the 30 best up and coming photographers.  On their travel piece to Mexico:

If you missed our photographs of Las Pozas, Edw ard James’s surrealist wonderland in Xilitla, Mexico, you can find the story on the T Magazine website.

We shot for most of the twenty-four hours we spent in Don Eduardo’s jungle. Here are a few more.

…

M. Degas Teachers Art and Science at Durfee Intermediate School — Detroit 1942
Philip Levine……………………………………………………….
…………………………………………………………………….

He made a line on the blackboard,
one bold stroke from right to left
diagonally downward and stood back
to ask, looking as always at no one
in particular, “What have I done?”
From the back of the room Freddie
shouted, “You’ve broken a piece
of chalk.” M. Degas did not smile.
“What have I done?” he repeated.
The most intellectual students
looked down to study their desks
except for Gertrude Bimmler, who raised
her hand before she spoke. “M. Degas,
you have created the hypotenuse
of an isosceles triangle.” Degas mused.
Everyone knew that Gertrude could not
be incorrect. “It is possible,”
Louis Warshowsky added precisely,
“that you have begun to represent
the roof of a barn.” I remember
that it was exactly twenty minutes
past eleven, and I thought at worst
this would go on another forty
minutes. It was early April,
the snow had all but melted on
the playgrounds, the elms and maples
bordering the cracked walks shivered
in the new winds, and I believed
that before I knew it I’d be
swaggering to the candy store
for a Milky Way. M. Degas
pursed his lips, and the room
stilled until the long hand
of the clock moved to twenty one
as though in complicity with Gertrude,
who added confidently, “You’ve begun
to separate the dark from the dark.”
I looked back for help, but now
the trees bucked and quaked, and I
knew this could go on forever.

…

Michael Hainey interviews Richards in GQ:

Didn’t Mick screw around with Anita?
Possibly yes. Probably during the making of that movie [Performance].

How did you and Mick get past that?
At the time, I didn’t know and I didn’t really care.

You didn’t?
No. I mean, Anita and I, it was never like we were ever married. And, uh, you don’t try and ride a bitch like that, baby, without thinking that they’re not gonna—you know. Had it. Been there. It’s a load of crap, you know? I mean, I’ve done Mick’s chicks, too.

How many chicks do you think you guys have in common?
After Marianne [Faithfull], it’s a stable. [laughs]

More than five?
No. I don’t want to mention other bitches’ names, because I’ve stolen quite a few off of him and, uh, he’s nudged his way into my lot, but not significantly. After the Anita thing, I made a point of stealing every bitch he had. [laughs]

But not his current one?
[whispers] I wouldn’t take that one on!

At Mick’s gayest, how gay was he?
It was camp.

Camp?
Yeah. It was all… I really have no idea if anyone ever shoved it up the shitter.

Not even Bowie?
No. I mean, dickering and dangling… I’m not there watching it every day. You know what I mean, mate? But there was, at the time, a load of excruciatingly painful campness that went on.

More here.  [Thanks SA.]

Milton Viorst in The Washington Post:

THE BIN LADENS: An Arabian Family in the American Century by Steve Coll.

Change the names and locations, and Steve Coll’s marvelous book about the bin Laden family would begin like a familiar American saga. An illiterate youth arrives in a land of opportunity from his impoverished homeland and, by dint of ambition, talent and hard work, becomes immensely rich and powerful. He collects properties, airplanes, luxury cars and women — tastes he passes on to his sons. He earns a niche in the pantheon of great builders of his adopted country.

The youth is Mohamed bin Laden, justly venerated in Saudi Arabia. But collective memory plays funny tricks, and in the West he will be permanently remembered as the father of Osama. The bin Ladens, though their Horatio Alger story overlaps Western experience, emerge as unmistakably Middle Eastern — to the point of being torn asunder by today’s religious struggles. Coll, a Pulitzer Prize winner and former Washington Post managing editor, leaves the psychology to his readers. He prefers writing on economics and politics, leavening them with anecdotes and gossip; the result is a fascinating panorama of a great family, presented within the context of the 9/11 drama.

More here.

From Edge:

Before I start one of my talks, I love to ask the audience how many people in the room think the science of global warming is settled. About half the audience puts their hands up. How many think it’s not? Maybe a third put their hands up. How many think it’s a stupid question? They laugh and they finally all put their hands up. There’s no such thing as all settled and unsettled.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—I participated in all four of them plus the two synthesis reports—said that warming is unequivocal. It’s absolutely right. Thermometers don’t lie, unlike certain pundits, business leaders and West Wing politicians. Plants don’t bloom earlier in the spring by accident, nor do birds come back earlier from migration by accident. Some do not act that way; that’s why we average them all up, to find out if the climate coin is loaded—and it is.

Warming is unequivocal, that’s true. But that’s not a sophisticated question. A much more sophisticated question is how much of the climate Ma Earth, a perverse lady, gives us is her own, and how much is caused by us.

More here.

If this video doesn’t work for you, try it at YouTube here.

From the National Geographic blog Intelligent Travel:

Waxing nostalgia about the bygone days of Paris is hardly new or rare, but that doesn’t make us eat up pitch-perfect prose on the City of Light any less. And when it’s written by the likes of Pulitzer Prize winner Stanley Karnow, who does it with such je ne sais quoi, we’re mere putty in his hands. Karnow—father of one of our favorite Traveler photographers, Catherine—penned a lovely account of living in Paris for ten years as a young man, starting in 1947, called Paris in the Fifties. We checked in with him recently to get his pulse on Paris, then and now.

How has Paris changed since you lived there in the 1950s?

You can’t afford it! There’s a phrase, one I use in my book: Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose—the more things change, the more things stay the same. Things have changed tremendously in Paris since my first time, but yet there’s a lot that hasn’t changed. It certainly still ranks as one of the most beautiful cities in the world, and its beauty has been greatly enhanced in recent years.

More here.  [Thanks to Marilyn Terrell.]

Stephen Sondheim turned 78 last Saturday. I expect he’s feeling pretty good about it, too, considering that the current season has seen the first Broadway revival of “Sunday in the Park With George” and the release of Tim Burton’s extraordinary film version of “Sweeney Todd.” A birthday boy can never get enough shiny toys, though, so I’m happy to report that Mr. Sondheim is spending the week unwrapping superb stagings of two of his very best shows.

The production of “Gypsy” that opened on Broadway last night is the same one that I reviewed when it ran for three weeks last July at City Center, so I needn’t say much beyond this: No matter how long you live, you’ll never see a more exciting or effective revival of a golden-age musical.

more from the WSJ here.

Robert Frank, the photographic master, the last human being it’s been said to discover anything new behind a viewfinder, collapsed in a filthy Chinese soup shop and no one had thought to bring along a camera.

He looked like something from a Kandinsky painting—slumped between a wall and stool—sea green, limp, limbs akimbo. It would have made a good, unsentimental picture: a dead man and a bowl of soup. Frank would have liked it. The lighting was right.

The shop was hidden away in the shadow of a Confucian temple in the ancient walled city of Pingyao, China, about 450 miles southwest of Beijing, where Frank had come as an honored guest of a photography festival. The city is a photographic dream, a 2,700-year-old dollhouse of clay brick, camels, coal embers, and carved cornices. So many photographers had descended upon the place that a picture of a man taking a picture of a man taking a picture of a man taking a picture of a picture was considered interesting enough and yet nobody at the dead man’s table had so much as a sketching tablet.

more from Vanity Fair here.

Along with Moore and Ross McElwee, Errol Morris was in the vanguard of directors who challenged the gospel according to verité. While Morris tends to exaggerate his own innovative daring—“from the very first film I made . . . I decided to break all of the rules”—in 1988 he outfitted an otherwise straightforward, interview-based dissection of a Dallas murder case with an assortment of noirish dramatic re-creations, clips from a TV crime series, gigantic close-ups of peripheral objects, bits of symbolic punctuation (such as a swinging pocket watch to evoke the hypnotizing of a witness), and a burbling Philip Glass score to help suture the disparate materials. The Thin Blue Line (1988), a box-office hit by documentary standards, presaged an outpouring of looser, entertainment-oriented doc styles. Paradoxically, its well-earned acclaim proved to be less a product of alluring visuals than of Morris’s having secured the recorded admission of a hardened criminal that the hapless subject of the film, convicted murderer Randall Dale Adams, had been framed, triggering the reopening of the case and Adams’s eventual release from prison.

This startling instance of documentary effectivity, rather than fueling the filmmaker’s investigative juices or honing his self-image as a social crusader, seems to have had the opposite result: a deepening reentrenchment in the realm of personal psychology buttressed by an obsessive concern with so-called moral questions abstracted from their social context and wider consequences.

more from artforum here.

Also over at the G-Spot, Kathy has a post on the limited role of technological change on inequality in America.

In a recent post, Mickey Kaus attacks Barack Obama for blaming the middle-class squeeze on, in Obama’s words, “a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests.” But Kaus attributes inequality to something entirely different. Sayeth Mickey:

I would tend to blame … increasing returns to skill produced by trade and technological change! They are hard to personify and demonize–they’re just problematic trends we all need to confront.

That is a deeply problematic statement. Yes, a decade or so ago most economists probably would have attributed ever-growing levels of inequality to increasing returns to skill produced by trade and technology. But Mickey, the World’s Most Annoying Democratic Concern Troll™, obviously hasn’t been paying much attention lately, which is not surprising.

Kaus, whose brain seemed to stop functioning sometime during the Reagan era, is not exactly doing a lot of intellectual heavy lifting these days. Because if he were, he’d know that more and more economists and policy types are coming around to the view that something other than “increasing returns to skill” is going on here. The short answer to why our society is experiencing near-record levels of economic inequality? It’s the politics, stupid.

Dani Rodrik at Project Syndicate:

How does globalization reshape wealth and opportunity around the world? Is it mainly a force for good, enabling poor nations to lift themselves up from poverty by taking part in global markets? Or does it create vast opportunities only for a small minority?

To answer these questions, look no farther than soccer. Ever since European clubs loosened restrictions on the number of foreign players, the game has become truly global. African players, in particular, have become ubiquitous, supplementing the usual retinue of Brazilians and Argentines. Indeed, the foreign presence in soccer surpasses anything that we see in other areas of international commerce.

Arsenal, which currently leads the English Premier League, fields 11 starters who typically do not include a single British player. Indeed, all the English players for the four English clubs that recently advanced to the final 8 of the UEFA Champions’ League would hardly be enough to field a single team.

There is little doubt that foreign players enhance the quality of play in the European club championships. Europe’s soccer scene would not be half as exciting without strikers such as Cote d’Ivoire’s Didier Drogba (Chelsea) or Cameroon’s Samuel Eto’o (Barcelona).  The benefits to African talent are easy to see, too. African players are able to earn much more money by marketing their skills in Europe – not just the top clubs in the Premiership or the Spanish Primera Liga, but the countless nouveau-riche clubs in Russia, Ukraine, or Turkey.    

Saba Mahmood over at The Immanent Frame:

The series of posts at The Immanent Frame that have responded to the question “Is critique secular?” were initially inspired by an event that I, along with Judith Butler and Chris Nealon, organized last year at The Townsend Center for the Humanities at UC Berkeley. Given the SSRC’s current focus on religion and secularism, Jonathan VanAntwerpen invited the conference organizers and participants, and a range of others, to post their reflections on this event and the question that framed it (see posts by Talal Asad, Chris Nealon, and Colin Jager—all of whom participated in the symposium). Here I would like to give a sense of the ongoing stakes some of us have in this conversation and why I think it is important to think about secularism in relation to critique given the political bent of our times.

The symposium “Is Critique Secular?” was the inaugural event for a new teaching and research unit in critical theory at UC Berkeley, plans for which had been in gestation for over a year. While the motivations for the establishment of this program were diverse, there is a group of us who are interested in opening up traditional ways of thinking about critique to recent problematizations of notions of the secular, secularity, and secularism.

Martha Nussbaum on prostitution in ajc.com:

Many types of bodily wage labor used to be socially stigmatized. In the Middle Ages it was widely thought base to take money for the use of one’s scholarly services. Adam Smith, in “The Wealth of Nations,” tells us there are “some very agreeable and beautiful talents” that are admirable so long as no pay is taken for them, “but of which the exercise for the sake of gain is considered, whether from reason or prejudice, as a sort of publick prostitution.” For this reason, he continues, opera singers, actors and dancers must be paid an “exorbitant” wage, to compensate them for the stigma involved in using their talents “as the means of subsistence.” His discussion is revealing for what it shows us about stigma. Today few professions are more honored than that of opera singer; and yet only 200 years ago, that public use of one’s body for pay was taken to be a kind of prostitution.

Some of the stigma attached to opera singers was a general stigma about wage labor. Wealthy elites have always preferred genteel amateurism. But the fact that passion was being expressed publicly with the body — particularly the female body — made singers, dancers and actors nonrespectable in polite society until very recently. Now they are respectable, but women who take money for sexual services are still thought to be doing something that is not only nonrespectable but so bad that it should remain illegal.

What should really trouble us about sex work? That it is sex that these women do, with many customers, should not in and of itself trouble us, from the point of view of legality, even if we personally don’t share the woman’s values. Nonetheless, it is this one fact that still-Puritan America finds utterly intolerable.

[H/t: Ruchira Paul]

My late friend Eqbal Ahmad used to collect Gandharan Art. It was beautiful. Pre-Islamic culture was denigrated in Pakistan, and he felt the need to do his bit to preserve it.  But perhaps most important, it was for Eqbal, who was shaped in the struggle against colonialism, a reminder that the first major conquest of what would become the East by what would become the West was also productive and syncretic. Now a new exhibit looks at the influence of Western modernism on Islamic art. Holland Cotter reviews an exhibition of Islamic art at Hunter College, co-curated by 3QD contributer Alta Price.

The show is notable for several reasons. First, it tackles a little-studied subject. We’ve had major exhibitions on the influence of Islamic culture on Europe. We’ve had relatively few that trace influence the other way, Occident to Orient. (“Royal Persian Painting: the Qajar Epoch, 1785-1925” at the Brooklyn Museum a decade ago was a stellar exception.)

Possibly because “Occidentalized” sounds unexotic, 18th- and 19th-century Islamic art has been largely ignored. Few of the 30 small decorative objects at Hunter have been exhibited before, though all are from the collection of a major museum.

Which brings us to another — some might say the primary — attraction of the show. The owning institution is the Metropolitan Museum, where the Islamic galleries are closed for renovation. This Hunter show, unassuming as it is, is by default the largest display of the Met’s Islamic collection in the city.

“Re-Orientations” is actually the offshoot of a larger project: a yearlong seminar led by Ulku U. Bates, professor of Islamic art at Hunter, using material in the Met holdings to examine the early effects of Western modernism on Islamic cultures, its impact kicking in at different times in different places.