From Prospect Magazine:

In late January, the Israeli novelist AB Yehoshua wrote an article in the country’s largest-circulation newspaper, Yediot Aharonot, urging the US to temporarily recall its ambassador from Israel. That act of diplomatic pique, he said, would be proof of America’s friendship to his country. The purpose, Yehoshua wrote, would be to pressure Prime Minister Olmert to evacuate the tiny West Bank settlements known as outposts, which violate Israeli and international law. Olmert and his predecessor Ariel Sharon had been promising President Bush to dismantle outposts for over three years. Olmert has publicly said that the country shames itself by not acting, but he fears the violent protests of the outpost settlers. Since most Israelis value good relations with the US, an American show of displeasure would help produce the public backing Olmert needs. “If the US is a true friend of Israel,” Yehoshua said, “it must help her through a symbolic act of protest.”

Yehoshua is an immense figure in Israeli culture. His novels are canonical. He is outspokenly dovish but firmly within the mainstream left. He is also an old-fashioned Zionist who offends diaspora Jews by saying that one can only live a full Jewish life in Israel. So the man calling for America to lean on Israel is no radical. (In fact, in Israel Yehoshua’s article promptly vanished from public notice, presumably deemed unremarkable.)

By asking for a deus ex machina to intervene in Israeli politics, Yehoshua was demonstrating the despair of Israel’s peace camp. The left’s once-forbidden positions—a two-state solution, evacuating settlements—are now boringly respectable. Olmert, a recovering rightist, supports them. But nothing happens. Why can’t a winged figure descend to get the plot moving? America has filled that role for Israel before, vetoing UN security council condemnations, providing aid. Someone simply needs to tell the gods what Israel actually needs. I write this not to mock Yehoshua but to agree with him. As a progressive Israeli, I long to see a shift in US policy. With Yehoshua, I believe that the right actions by the US could awaken public support here in Israel for the steps needed to reach peace.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Where would we be without bananas? The silent-movie industry, founded on images of men in bowler hats being launched into the air by banana skins, might never have gotten off the ground, so to speak. Kids would have to pack drippy citrus into their lunch boxes. The band Bananarama could have been the more fetid Apricotarota. When Shakespeare “let slip the dogs of war,” what do you think they slipped on? I am banana-powered. When I was growing up, my daily breakfast carried the official name of “Rice Krispies, banana and milk.” Nowadays I often tuck a banana into a pocket on my cycling shirt, for a midride potassium pick-me-up. In fact, I’m taking a short break to eat a banana right now.

Okay, I’m back. (I smeared a little peanut butter on the banana, something that doesn’t work that well while biking.) What’s my lifetime banana record? According to Dan Koeppel, author of Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World, “If you are an average American, about forty years old, you’re probably approaching banana ten thousand.” So I’m probably up to about 15,000 bananas. (Because of my age? Because I’m not average? I’m not telling.)

More here.

Over at blogginheads.tv, Joshua Knobe and Paul Bloom discuss religion and morality:

Over at the TLS, Ruth Morse reviews Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence (via bookforum):

Because this is a romance, Salman Rushdie can exploit many sources (indeed, he gives a bibliography at the end); because this is a Rushdie romance, it combines aspects of the Italian romantic epics of both Boiardo’s and Ariosto’s Orlando with Persian and South Asian story collections and legendary history. Because good storytelling also knows what not to tell, Rushdie leaves many loose ends, from the unresolved questions of the stranger’s name and parentage and his fate, to Florentine and Mughal history, to the similarly unresolved endings of many of the dozens of characters he conjures up along the way. In the rush, many stories are sketched rather than told; no character is more than a suggestion, and no speech is individual to its speaker. Some of this is possible because we know these stories already, but all of it is at the cost of any exploration of individual or situation. They are, or seek to be, their own justification – but the price is high. Rushdie’s narrator is explicit about this: most audiences can leave, or close a book; when the king is the audience, the risks are higher. Long and boring narrators will be cut.

Salman Rushdie has used his gifts to explore large themes – such as mortality, nationality, religion and love – and his bitter disappointment in their failed promises. This ninth long fiction is a pendant to the previous one, Shalimar the Clown, published in 2005. And that book reprised aspects of Fury, published in 2001. All three books use breathtakingly paced sets of plots, interlinked with back stories, delightedly offending the boundaries of verisimilitude. All repeat elements which combine stereotypes with the writer’s own obsessions: Kashmir, revenge, the longing for peaceful religious and ethnic coexistence, and a savage anger about the perpetual dying of love. Rushdie has never been afraid to use popular media such as film or thriller plots, or traditional story collections, which he pillages in order to fascinate readers with his complex inventiveness and pyrotechnic style.

Via EurekAlert!, over at Georgia Tech:

Sports professionals and fans get pretty emotional about their picks for the NCAA basketball tournament each year, and that emotion often clouds their judgment.

But three engineering professors at the Georgia Institute of Technology have created a computer ranking system, called LRMC, that consistently predicts NCAA basketball rankings more accurately than the AP poll of sportswriters and the ESPN/USA Today poll of coaches, formulas (the Ratings Percentage Index), other computer models (the Massey ratings and the Sagarin ratings), and even the tournament seeds themselves.

After correctly picking all four of this year’s finalists, the LRMC method has now identified 30 of the last 36 Final Four participants (83 percent accuracy over the past nine years of NCAA tournaments) as one of the top two teams in their region. Over the same nine-year stretch, the seedings and polls have correctly identified only 23, and the RPI indentified 21.

In The New Left Review,  Zhang Yongle:

The publication date for this long-planned selection of articles from Dushu—probably China’s leading intellectual journal of the past decade, as well as its most controversial—has turned out to be highly ironic.sdx Publishing Company: Beijing 2007, in six volumes.’, FGCOLOR, ‘#E3E3E3’, BGCOLOR, ‘#000000’)” name=”_ednref1″ href=”http://www.newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2704#_edn1″> [1] In July 2007, even as the six-volume Essentials of Dushu collection was appearing in the bookshops, its two chief editors, Wang Hui and Huang Ping, were being dismissed from the monthly magazine by its parent company, sdx Publishing. The official grounds for this seemed scarcely plausible: initially there was talk of falling circulation, although in fact the number of Dushu subscribers had risen under Wang and Huang, from around 60,000 to well over 100,000. sdx then announced that it was implementing a company policy that required all chief editors to be full-time, rather than complement their work with university teaching, as was the case for Wang and Huang. The company could provide no explanation, however, as to why it had suddenly ‘remembered’ this policy, which had existed for many years without ever being enforced.

The dismissals provoked a storm of controversy among Chinese intellectuals: debate raged in cyberspace, newspapers and journals over the merits of the ‘Wang and Huang era’ of Dushu. The editors’ detractors argued that the two had turned the journal, ‘universally recognized’ by the Chinese intelligentsia in the 1980s and early 90s, into a platform for a small ‘new-left clique’, abandoned its elegant prose tradition and rendered it too specialized to be readable.

On July 14, 1959, the Richmond News Leader ran an editorial by Ezra Pound entitled “Keynes Brainwashed Electorate with Economic Hogwash.” It was his first and last publication in the Virginia newspaper—despite a yearlong stint as its foreign correspondent in Europe. In typical Pound style, it was a scathing swipe at the English economist, occasioned by an article that Pound had not bothered to read. Nevertheless, his editor, James J. Kilpatrick, was relieved to find the article publishable. Since the previous summer, Pound had been submitting letters and articles from Italy on a handful of topics, usually politics, none of which Kilpatrick had deemed coherent enough to run. In a letter to a friend, Pound said he had written this last piece in “what I believe is clear and simple (as he request) language.”

The bulk of Pound’s feisty, allusive writing for the paper, however, remained unprinted and unknown, buried in Kilpatrick’s desk drawer—it was “over Richmond’s head,” Pound proposed—until it eventually was donated to the University of Virginia Library. Assembled in print here, for the first time, these eight pieces represent some of the preoccupations, musings, and typically bold assertions of the physically and mentally aging poet in his final period of sustained energetic writing and correspondence. They also illuminate a nearly forgotten moment in Pound’s life—a crucial late crossroads, when he briefly considered taking Virginia, instead of Italy, as his final home.

more from VQR here.

Fatma Aykut on Dutch populist Geert Wilders’ film Fitna, in Der Spiegel:

Wilders’ film offers a prophecy for “Holland’s future”: bloodied children will cower before their abusive mothers, gays will be hanged and young girls will be subjected to genital mutilation.

If the topic of Muslim integration in Europe weren’t so important, it would be tempting to treat the film as a caricature of itself and smirk at it a little. Wilders portrays his subject so mercilessly that it’s impossible to take him or his film seriously. It’s hardly politically correct to admit, but “Fitna” does have a certain explosive power. On the other hand, is it even possible today to make a film critical of Islam without fear of assassination, protests and violence? I ask this question as a Muslim woman.

I am sure that many people in Holland, and here in Germany, share Wilders’ beliefs. Personally, I’d like to know what Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble has to say on the matter.

The tricky thing about the film is that Wilder’s does manage to show one facet of the Muslim experience in Europe. Annoyingly, it’s even in documentary format. It would be downright foolish to be against the film “on principle.” Wilders portrays a mindset that undoubtedly exists in Amsterdam, in Paris and in Berlin.

But he chooses to ignore certain realities of Muslim life in Europe: The high rate of unemployment among immigrants, the slim chances of receiving a good education, the daily encounters with racism and the countless immigrant children — particularly boys — who are abandoned.

So which came first — the chicken or the egg?

In the translation Poussin read, that picture is a meditation on three themes—the art of painting, the beauty of nature, and the character of human destiny—the very subjects that preoccupied Poussin throughout his career, and of which he sought to give final expression in this last series. The full significance of such profound works has been discussed by scholars and critics ever since their making. What is not open to dispute is the fixity of attention and the seriousness of purpose with which he completed these sublime paintings. Joshua Reynolds, William Hazlitt, and Kenneth Clark have each compared Poussin with the epic grandeur of Milton, and looking at these works, I am reminded of lines from the conclusion of Il Penseroso, which was written in the 1630s:

And may at last my weary age
Find out the peacefull hermitage,
…
Where I may sit and rightly spell
Of every Star that heav’n doth shew,
And every Herb that sips the dew;
Till old experience do attain
To something like Prophetic strain.

Like the narrator of the poem, Poussin contemplated human character and natural order in search of the essential and the eternal.

more from the NYRB here.

On his first day in England, in 1726, Voltaire went to Greenwich Fair. He was struck by the elegant costume of the young girls in cotton gowns racing across the grass and the fashionable young men on horseback. That evening, he was presented to some ladies of the Court “who were stiff and cold and took tea and made a great noise with their fans”. To his astonishment, they told him that the beau monde would not dream of demeaning itself by attending such a fair, and that “all these good-looking persons, in their calico dresses, were maidservants or country girls; that all these resplendent young men, so well mounted and caracoling round the race-course, were mere students or apprentices on hired horses”. Other foreign visitors, both earlier and later, were taken by how well dressed the English poor were. At the end of the seventeenth century, Henri Misson expressed surprise that “the very peasants are generally dressed in cloth”, that is, wool. Half a century later, Madame du Bocage found that in Oxfordshire cottages “the poorest country girls drink tea, have bodices of chintz, straw hats on their heads and scarlet cloaks upon their shoulders”. By contrast, in Ireland in 1777 Arthur Young found the country people often wretchedly dressed and going barefoot.

more from the TLS here.

On the ninth of November, 1953, a few days after his thirty-ninth birthday, Dylan Thomas died in New York.  At the time of his death a new poem was still unfinished, and the collaboration with Stravinsky, planned for the end of the year, had not even begun.  The survival of Under Milkwood is a remarkable piece of good fortune, for it was not completed until Thomas came within a month of his death, though he had worked intermittently on the play for nearly ten years.  There was no time for any final revision of the text by the poet himself, but we are justified in regarding what he has left as a complete work. —Preface, Under Milkwood

From Under Milkwood
Dylan Thomas

ROSIE PROBET (Softly)
What seas did you see
Tom Cat, Tom Cat,
In your sailoring days
Long long ago?
What sea beasts were
In the wavery green
When you were my master?

CAPTAIN CAT
I’ll tell you the truth.
Seas barking like seals,
Blue seas and green,
Seas covered with eels
And mermen and whales.

ROSIE PROBERT
What seas did you sail
Old whaler when
On the blubbery waves
Between Frisco and Wales
You were my bosun?

CAPTAIN CAT
As true as I’m here
Dear you and Tom Cat’s tart
You landlubber Rosie
You cosy love
My easy as easy
My true sweetheart,
Seas green as a bean
Seas gliding with swans
In the seal-barking moon.

ROSIE PROBERT
What seas were you rocking
My little deck hand
My favorite husband
In your seaboots and hunger
My duck my whaler
My honey my daddy
My pretty sugar sailor
With my name on your belly
When you were a boy
Long long ago?

CAPTAIN CAT
I’ll tell you no lies.
The only sea I saw
Was the seasaw sea
With you riding on it.
Lie down, lie easy
let me shipwreck in your thighs.

ROSIE PROBERT
Knock twice, Jack,
At the door of my grave
And ask for Rosie.

CAPTAIN CAT
Rosie Probert.

ROSIE PROBERT
Remember her.
She is forgetting.
The earth which filled her mouth
Is vanishing from her.
Remember me.
I have forgotten you.
I am going into the darkness of the
…..darknes for ever.
I have forgotten that I was ever born.

..

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.]