I and others want literature to return to the artfulness of literary art and to reach out to science, now that science has at last found ways to explore human nature and human minds. Since these are, respectively, the subject and the object of literature, it would be fatal for literary study to continue to cut itself off from science, from the power of discovery possible through submitting ideas to the rule of evidence.

There are many ways in which science can return us to and enrich the art of literature. We could consider human natures and minds as understood by science and as represented in literature, not just as seen through the approved lenses of race, gender, and class, but in terms, for instance, of the human life history cycle, or social cognition, or cooperation versus competition. Or we could develop multileveled explanations that allow room for the universals of human nature, and for the local in culture and history, and for individuality, in authors and audiences, and for the particular problem situations faced in this or that stint of composition or comprehension.

more from The American Scholar here.

All theater is magic. Even the most naturalistic of productions seek to deceive us into supposing that the stage we see is really someplace else: a cluttered living room, a sterile doctor’s office, a grimy inner-city diner. But few things can be so spellbinding as a play whose director shrugs off literalism and chooses instead to wave the wand of imagination. That’s what happens in the production of “The Tempest” currently being presented by Boston’s Actors’ Shakespeare Project, in which Patrick Swanson takes Shakespeare’s tale of a ship run ashore on an enchanted isle and turns it into a 19th-century magic show. I’ve reviewed many memorable Shakespeare productions in this space, but Mr. Swanson’s “Tempest,” like the “King Lear” that he mounted for Actors’ Shakespeare two seasons ago, ranks very near the top of my list.

more from the WSJ here.

It seems that the spectre than haunts Europe is that of 1968. Alain Badiou in The New Left Review:

Sarkozy has now finally finished off the cadaverous form of Gaullism over which Chirac presided. The Socialists’ collapse had already been anticipated in the rout of Jospin in the presidential elections of 2002 (and still more by the disastrous decision to embrace Chirac in the second round). The present decomposition of the Socialist Party, however, is not just a matter of its political poverty, apparent now for many years, nor of the actual size of the vote—47 per cent is not much worse than its other recent scores. Rather, the election of Sarkozy appears to have struck a blow to the entire symbolic structuring of French political life: the system of orientation itself has suffered a defeat. An important symptom of the resulting disorientation is the number of former Socialist placemen rushing to take up appointments under Sarkozy, the centre-left opinion-makers singing his praises; the rats have fled the sinking ship in impressive numbers. The underlying rationale is, of course, that of the single party: since all accept the logic of the existing capitalist order, market economy and so forth, why maintain the fiction of opposing parties?

Colin Vaines, Patrick Marber, Sam Taylor-Wood, Joe Wright, and Philip French eulogize Minghella in The Guardian. Philip French:

Anthony Minghella was one of our greatest filmmakers. When I first met him he looked like an elderly art student. Later, shorn of his beard, his disappearing hair cut to the skull, he came to resemble a cheerfully confident Buddhist monk.

Our first meeting was in Cannes in 1992, at a lunch given by Sam Goldwyn Jr for the out-of-competition screening of Minghella’s second movie, Mr Wonderful, a charming, lightweight romantic comedy set in New York’s blue-collar Italian-American milieu, which he understood well from his own background in Britain. I had admired his broadcasting writing, especially a BBC radio play called Cigarettes and Chocolate, in which Juliet Stevenson had appeared (as she did in his first movie Truly Madly Deeply), and thought his Made in Bangkok, an attack on the exploitation of the third world by European tourists, one of the best things to appear in the West End during the Eighties.

On a personal level, I was immediately struck by his charm, modesty and gifts as a conversationalist. At that time I thought him a talented miniaturist, part of the tradition David Lean had been criticising in a controversial speech at Cannes a few years before, when he took British film-makers to task for parochialism and lack of large-scale vision. When in 1996 I saw The English Patient, I realised Minghella was now carrying the torch for ambitious, visionary cinema that had once been upheld by Michael Powell and Lean.

From The Nation:

Win or lose, whatever happens next, Barack Obama is now established as one of those rare, courageous teachers who leads the country onto new ground. He has given us a way to talk about race and our other differences with the clarity and honesty that politics does not normally tolerate. Whether this hurts or helps his presidential prospects is not yet clear, but he has done this for us and it will change the country, whatever the costs to him.

His words should discourage the media frenzy of fear-driven gotcha. His speech in Philadelphia on Tuesday may also make the Clintons re-think their unsubtle exploitation of racial tension. But nobody knows the depth or strength of the commonplace fears streaming through the underground of public feelings. No one can be sure of what people will hear in Obama’s confident embrace, beckoning Americans in all their differences, leaving out no one, to a better understanding of themselves.

More here.

…
Please Call Me by My True Names
Thich Nhat Hanh

Don’t say that I will depart tomorrow —
even today I am still arriving.
Look deeply: every second I am arriving
to be a bud on a Spring branch,
to be a tiny bird, with still-fragile wings,
learning to sing in my new nest,
to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,
to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.

I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,
to fear and to hope.

The rhythm of my heart is the birth and death
of all that is alive.

I am the mayfly metamorphosing
on the surface of the river.
And I am the bird
that swoops down to swallow the mayfly.

I am the frog swimming happily
in the clear water of a pond.
And I am the grass-snake
that silently feeds itself on the frog.

I am the child in Uganda, all skin and bones,
my legs as thin as bamboo sticks.
And I am the arms merchant,
selling deadly weapons to Uganda.

I am the twelve-year-old girl,
refugee on a small boat,
who throws herself into the ocean
after being raped by a sea pirate.
And I am the pirate,
my heart not yet capable
of seeing and loving.

I am a member of the politburo,
with plenty of power in my hands.
And I am the man who has to pay
his “debt of blood” to my people
dying slowly in a forced-labor camp.

My joy is like Spring, so warm
it makes flowers bloom all over the Earth.
My pain is like a river of tears,
so vast it fills the four oceans.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can hear all my cries and my laughter at once,
so I can see that my joy and pain are one.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can wake up,
and so the door of my heart
can be left open,
the door of compassion.

..

From Scientific American:

A salamander’s limbs are smaller and a bit slimier than those of most people, but otherwise they are not that different from their human counterparts. The salamander limb is encased in skin, and inside it is composed of a bony skeleton, muscles, ligaments, tendons, nerves and blood vessels. A loose arrangement of cells called fibroblasts holds all these internal tissues together and gives the limb its shape. Yet a salamander’s limb is unique in the world of vertebrates in that it can regrow from a stump after an amputation. An adult salamander can regenerate a lost arm or leg this way over and over again, regardless of how many times the part is amputated. Frogs can rebuild a limb during tadpole stages when their limbs are first growing out, but they lose this ability in adulthood. Even mammalian embryos have some ability to replace developing limb buds, but that capacity also disappears well before birth. Indeed, this trend toward declining regenerative capacity over the course of an organism’s development is mirrored in the evolution of higher animal forms, leaving the lowly salamander as the only vertebrate still able to regrow complex body parts throughout its lifetime.

Humans have long wondered how the salamander pulls off this feat. How does the regrowing part of the limb “know” how much limb is missing and needs to be replaced? Why doesn’t the skin at the stump form a scar to seal off the wound as it would in humans? How can adult salamander tissue retain the embryonic potential to build an entire limb from scratch multiple times? Biologists are closing in on the answers to those questions. And if we can understand how the regeneration process works in nature, we hope to be able to trigger it in people to regenerate amputated limbs, for example, and transform the healing of other major wounds.

More here.

Okay, so I am new to the YouTube game. Freddy‘s birthday was yesterday (yes, right on the vernal equinox), but I couldn’t get the video stuff figured out in time. Anyhow, here it is:

Over at bloggingheads.tv, Loury (a Clinton supporter) and McWhorter (an Obama supporter) have an insightful discussion on Obama, race, and the campaign in the wake of Obama’s speech on race:

Pankaj Mishra is the Guardian’s Comment is Free:

Tibet’s economy has surpassed China’s average growth rate, helped by generous subsidies from Beijing and more than a million tourists a year. The vast rural hinterland shows few signs of this growth, but Lhasa, with its shopping malls, glass-and-steel office buildings, massage parlours and hair saloons, resembles a Chinese provincial city on the make. Beijing hopes that the new rail link to Lhasa, which makes possible the cheap extraction of Tibet’s uranium and copper, will bring about kuayueshi fazhan (“leapfrog development”) – economic, social and cultural.

Tibet has been enlisted into what is the biggest and swiftest modernisation in history: China’s development on the model of consumer capitalism, which has been cheer-led by the Wall Street Journal and other western financial media that found in China the corporate holy grail of low-priced goods and high profits. Tibetans – whose biggest problem, according to Rupert Murdoch, is believing that the Dalai Lama “is the son of God” – have the chance to be on the right side of history; they could discard their superstitions and embrace, like Murdoch, China’s brave new world. So why do they want independence? How is it that, as the Economist put it, “years of rapid economic growth, which China had hoped would dampen separatist demands, have achieved the opposite”?

For one, the Chinese failed to consult Tibetans about the kind of economic growth they wanted. In this sense, at least, Tibetans are not much more politically impotent than the hundreds of millions of hapless Chinese uprooted by China’s Faustian pact with consumer capitalism.

Shadi Hamid in the Washington Post:

While Barack Obama’s speech on race earlier this week was geared primarily toward domestic concerns, as an American of Middle Eastern origin, watching from a café in Jordan, I was struck by the possibilities it offered not only for race relations at home, but for our relationship with Arabs and Muslims abroad.

Obama declared that “the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding.” He was speaking, of course, about the legacy of slavery and segregation. But he might as well have been talking about the burgeoning anger toward America felt by millions of frustrated Muslims around the world. And the conversation Obama tried to initiate — contextualizing radicalism and seeking its source rather than merely denouncing it — is the sort of conversation that could also lay the groundwork for a long-overdue reassessment of our approach to the Middle East.

Thus far, the national discourse on the question of Muslim anti-Americanism, and particularly the violence and terror perpetrated in the name of Islam, has been dominated by condemnation and denunciation. As it must be. Targeting innocents — whether they are Israeli children on their way to school or the nearly 3,000 Americans who showed up to work one day and found it would be their last — can never be excused. And we must unapologetically wage war on those who seek to destroy us.

At the same time, we can’t simply wish future violence and terrorism away by relegating it to the domain of irrational, crazed fanaticism. We cannot say that “they hate us for who we are” and leave it at that.

More here.

In Sophocles’ tragedy, Antigone is caught between her religion and her state. After her brother is killed assaulting the city, her uncle Creon forbids her to bury him. But according to the tenets of her faith, if Antigone does not bury her brother, she will have disobeyed the gods and forfeit her own afterlife. Eventually, she kills herself.

Martha C. Nussbaum tells the ancient Greek story in “Liberty of Conscience,” her grand and penetrating discourse on religion and American law, to illustrate how an unbending state can impose a “tragic burden” on a member of a religious minority. This demonstrates two of Nussbaum’s prodigious strengths. As a teacher and scholar of law, philosophy and religion at the University of Chicago, she brings the insights of each discipline to bear on the others. And because she’s attuned to the “springs of conscience” that well up from faith — Nussbaum left the Episcopal Church for Reform Judaism when she married — she can analyze some of the Supreme Court’s recent jurisprudence on religion with sympathy rather than disdain for the enterprise of accommodation. She’s no atheist, she’s no evangelical, and she’s still worried.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

In his 1985 breakout novel, “Less Than Zero,” Bret Easton Ellis, then all of 21 years old, created young, jaded Angelenos who just didn’t care about anything: They recounted cocaine scores and semi-anonymous sex in the same tone with which they lamented their fading suntans. That ennui became Ellis’ literary signature, and as he began to grow up in public, he became known as a photogenic and glamorous figure who liked booze and excess.

More than two decades later and almost four years after returning home to L.A., the city in which he grew up as the offspring of affluent Goldwater Republicans, Ellis himself claims to be in a phase in which he just doesn’t care about anything — a middle-aged wrinkle on the old Ellis ennui. “The only thing I care about,” he requested when setting up a dinner interview, “is valet parking and a full bar.”

more from the LA Times here.

From The Boston Globe:

BEGINNING IN 1997, an important change swept over cotton farms in northern China. By adopting new farming techniques, growers found they could spray far less insecticide over their fields. Within four years they had reduced their annual use of the poisonous chemicals by 156 million pounds – almost as much as is used in the entire state of California each year. Cotton yields in the region climbed, and production costs fell. insecticide-related illnesses among farmers in the region dropped to a quarter of their previous level.

Strikingly, the number of insecticide-related illnesses among farmers in the region dropped to a quarter of their previous level. This story, which has been repeated around the world, is precisely the kind of triumph over chemicals that organic-farming advocates wish for.

But the hero in this story isn’t organic farming. It is genetic engineering.

The most important change embraced by the Chinese farmers was to use a variety of cotton genetically engineered to protect itself against insects. The plants carry a protein called Bt, a favorite insecticide of organic farmers because it kills pests but is nontoxic to mammals, birds, fish, and humans. By 2001, Bt cotton accounted for nearly half the cotton produced in China. For anyone worried about the future of global agriculture, the story is instructive. The world faces an enormous challenge: Its growing population demands more food and other crops, but standard commercial agriculture uses industrial quantities of pesticides and harms the environment in other ways. The organic farming movement has shown that it is possible to dramatically reduce the use of insecticides, and that doing so benefits both farm workers and the environment. But organic farming also has serious limits – there are many pests and diseases that cannot be controlled using organic approaches, and organic crops are generally more expensive to produce and buy. To meet the appetites of the world’s population without drastically hurting the environment requires a visionary new approach: combining genetic engineering and organic farming.

More here.

Nicholas D. Kristof in the New York Times Book Review:

The first large-scale scientific test of family planning took place in Khanna, India, beginning in the early 1950s. Backed by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health, researchers asked 8,000 villagers how often they had sex, whether they wanted to conceive and the details of the women’s menstrual cycles. The researchers met the villagers monthly and provided contraceptives, while closely monitoring another group that was given no contraceptives. After five years, the women given contraceptives had a higher birth rate than those who hadn’t received any assistance.

That initiative was an early warning that population policy can be very difficult to get right. In “Fatal Misconception,” Matthew Connelly, an associate professor of history at Columbia University, carefully assembles a century’s worth of mistakes, arrogance, racism, sexism and incompetence in what the jacket copy calls a “withering critique” of “a humanitarian movement gone terribly awry.”

Efforts to control population have long been ferociously controversial, and the United States under George W. Bush refuses to provide a penny of funding for the United Nations Population Fund because of its supposed (but in fact nonexistent) links to forced abortion in China.

More here.

COLM TOIBIN in The New York Times:

HUMAN SMOKE The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization.

By Nicholson Baker.  The main figures in the book are Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt; members of the pacifist movement including Gandhi; Hitler and his entourage; and diarists like Victor Klemperer in Dresden and Mihail Sebastian in Bucharest. But sometimes it is the simple stark fact that makes you sit up straight for a moment, like this one from early in the book: “The Royal Air Force dropped more than 150 tons of bombs on India. It was 1925.” This, coming soon after an account of the proposed bombing of civilian targets in Iraq in 1920 (with Churchill writing: “I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes”), sets a theme for the book, which Baker will skillfully weave into the fabric of events mainly between 1920 and 1942 — that the bombing of villages and cities from the air represents “the end of civilization.”

Churchill emerges here as a most fascinating figure — impetuous, childish, bloodthirsty, fearless, insomniac, bookish, bullying, determined, to name just some of his characteristics. Baker writes: “He wasn’t an alcoholic, someone said later — no alcoholic could drink that much.” The prime minister of Australia noted of Churchill: “In every conversation he ultimately reaches a point where he positively enjoys the war.” After the bombing of British cities Baker quotes him: “This ordeal by fire has, in a certain sense, even exhilarated the manhood and the womanhood of Britain.”

“One of our great aims,” Churchill wrote in July 1941, “is the delivery on German towns of the largest possible quantity of bombs per night.” Soon afterward, he said publicly: “It is time that the Germans should be made to suffer in their own homeland and cities something of the torments they have let loose upon their neighbors and upon the world.” Baker quotes large numbers of people who seemed to feel in these years that the entire German population, including women and children, were to blame for the Nazis and should be punished accordingly. For example, the writer Gerald Brenan: “Every German woman and child killed is a contribution to the future safety and happiness of Europe.” Or David Garnett (the author of the novel “Aspects of Love,” on which the musical is based), who wrote in 1941: “By butchering the German population indiscriminately it might be possible to goad them into a desperate rising in which every member of the Nazi Party would have his throat cut.”

More here.

..
——In a recent conversation, when I asked a firend how it was going he said, laughing, “My life is so good now, so wonderful, I’m in terror of things going to hell.”  My wife said to me later, “That’s what I like about him, he gets it.”
Jim C.

In Her Lovemaking She Grieves
Gagan Gill ””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””’
”””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””’

In her lovemaking, she grieves
In her grief, she makes love

In her lovemaking, she gives him a name
The one she gives the name is illusion
Maya, whose desire moves through her sleep

She knows, in the end
Whatever name she calls him by
Each name will only be an empty space.

Making love, she thinks
She is safe in her oblivion
In her longing, in her selfishness
She doesn’t remember that
The one she desires
Is just one fistful of bones.
Bones that come out of the crematorium
In just five minutes

Making love, she breathes
In his flesh, his marrow, his soul

Somewhere around here was his soul
Would she find it
In these fistful of bones?

Each time in her fear
She holds him tightly to her
Each time he slips out from her arms

In her lovemaking
In her grief

”

From The Economist:

By the standards of European scientific collaboration, €2m ($3.1m) is not a huge sum. But it might be the start of something that will challenge human perceptions of reality at least as much as the billions being spent by the European particle-physics laboratory (CERN) at Geneva. The first task of CERN‘s new machine, the Large Hadron Collider, which is due to open later this year, will be to search for the Higgs boson—an object that has been dubbed, with a certain amount of hyperbole, the God particle. The €2m, by contrast, will be spent on the search for God Himself—or, rather, for the biological reasons why so many people believe in God, gods and religion in general.

“Explaining Religion”, as the project is known, is the largest-ever scientific study of the subject. It began last September, will run for three years, and involves scholars from 14 universities and a range of disciplines from psychology to economics. And it is merely the latest manifestation of a growing tendency for science to poke its nose into the God business.

Religion cries out for a biological explanation. It is a ubiquitous phenomenon—arguably one of the species markers of Homo sapiens—but a puzzling one. It has none of the obvious benefits of that other marker of humanity, language. Nevertheless, it consumes huge amounts of resources. Moreover, unlike language, it is the subject of violent disagreements. Science has, however, made significant progress in understanding the biology of language, from where it is processed in the brain to exactly how it communicates meaning. Time, therefore, to put religion under the microscope as well.

More here.  [Thanks to Felix E. F. Larocca.]

Lisa Zyga in Physorg.com:

In an adapted version of the Harry Potter video game, players lift boulders and throw lightning bolts using only their minds. Just as physical movement changed the interface of gaming with Nintendo’s Wii, the power of the mind may be the next big thing in video games.

And it may come soon. Emotiv, a company based in San Francisco, says its mind-control headsets will be on shelves later this year, along with a host of novel “biofeedback” games developed by its partners.

Several other companies – including EmSense in Monterey, California; NeuroSky in San Jose, California; and Hitachi in Tokyo – are also developing technology to detect players´ brainwaves and use them in next-gen video games.

The technology is based on medical technology that has been around for decades. Using a combination of EEGs (which reveal alpha waves that signify calmness), EMGs (which measure muscle movement), and ECGs and GSR (which measure heart rate and sweating), developers hope to create a picture of a player´s mental and physical state. Near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), which monitors changes in blood oxygenation, could also be incorporated since it overcomes some of the interference problems with EEGs.

More here.  [Thanks to David Gassoway.]

Paul Salopek in National Geographic:

After I was arrested and imprisoned in Darfur, an American soldier told me, shaking his head in disgust, “You fly over this place and all you see is miles and miles of nothing.” But that was an outsider’s delusion. Every outcrop and plain was parsed by unseen tangents, lines, ghostly demarcations. They portioned off the claims of tribes, individuals, clans. They bulged and recoiled according to war and season. No-go zones encircled water holes. Certain unseen lines, masars, dictated the migration routes of nomads. There was nothing haphazard about any of this. To cross one line or to venture too far from another might invite retribution, even death. And that was the ultimate line of them all in the Sahel: the one between knowing and ignorance.

The Sahel itself is a line.

The word means “shore” in Arabic, which implies a continental margin, a grand beginning and a final end. Stretching across northern Africa roughly along the 13th parallel, the Sahel divides—or unites, depending on your philosophical bent—the sands of the Sahara and Africa’s tropical forests. It is a belt of semiarid grassland that separates (or joins) Arabs and blacks, Muslims and Christians, nomads and farmers, a landscape of greens and a world of tans. Some 50 million of the world’s poorest, most disempowered, most forgotten people hang fiercely on to life there. And for 34 days in Darfur we joined their ranks.

More here.  [Thanks to Marilyn Terrell.]