Arendt’s conceptual daring has been the object of admiring awe, but also of intense pro-and-con partisanship, for over a half century. First, of course, came The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). Having fled Germany in 1933 at the age of twenty-seven, and later Paris, after internment in southern France, Arendt arrived as a refugee in New York and spent eight years researching a book that would eventually, through much revision in dialogue with unfolding world events, yoke the regimes of Hitler and Stalin together to illuminate the ghastly new form of government they had in common. Today, scholars agree that Arendt wasn’t the first to use the term totalitarian or to compare the two seemingly opposite systems. But her study’s momentous flow of provocative assertions and its bewildering yet somehow literarily skillful juxtaposition of abstraction with the starkest facts fixed the idea in readers’ memories. Thereafter, Arendt moved intermittently among New York intellectuals and continued to blur categories that had hitherto been seen as opposed. She was a philosopher who offered notes on the very latest world affairs; she was a sometimes-obscure, elitist champion of political freedom.
more from Bookforum here.
In a brief 1996 memoir on his artistic development, the German painter Sigmar Polke wrote what amounts to a love letter to the potato. His description of the sprouting tuber is almost worthy of Albrecht Dürer. Polke talked of going to his cellar one day, and finding there “the very incarnation of everything art critics and teachers imagine when they think of a spontaneously creative subject with a love of innovation: the potato!” He went on to ask: “Why doesn’t the public turn its attention to the potato, where ultimate fulfilment awaits?” Why indeed. Certain of Polke’s images are hymns to the potato. In 1967 he built a Kartoffelhaus, or Potato House, based on the scientific principal of Faraday’s Cage.
more from The Guardian here.
Asad Raza wrote here at 3QD about 11 Spring Street a few weeks ago. Now Randy Kennedy picks up the story at the New York Times:
Depending on your point of view, the hulking 19th-century brick building at 11 Spring Street in NoLIta, a former stable and carriage house, was either a stunning eyesore or one of the most famous canvases and lodestars in the world for urban artists. When those of the latter view heard recently that the building had been sold and would soon be gutted and converted into condominiums, they considered it the end of an era. Bearing their cameras, they began showing up at the building over the last few weeks in a kind of mournful procession.
But inside the building over those same weeks, an unlikely tribute to 11 Spring’s history — and a brief reprieve for its artwork — was also quietly taking shape.
After buying the building several months ago, the new owner-developers, Caroline Cummings and Bill Elias, wanted to find some way to bid an appropriate farewell to its past.
More here.
From The Washington Post:
THE CLASSICAL WORLD: An Epic History From Homer to Hadrian By Robin Lane Fox.Greek and Latin may long since have lost their central place in Western education, but the influence of the classical world on our own culture remains very strong. It’s there in language and law, and far more vividly present in ideas and ways of thinking about the world. Both the name and concept of democracy came from the Greeks (even if in practice ancient democracies varied massively from each other and their modern counterparts). A century ago, people were fond of comparing the British Empire to that of Rome, and nowadays it is common to look at America in the same way. The great Greek historian Thucydides would have been delighted but not surprised by such analogies; when he chronicled the struggle between Athens and Sparta in the 5th century B.C., he claimed that the events he described would be “repeated in much the same way in the future.”
In reality, the parallels are rarely so neat, and all too often people twist the past to confirm their own preconceptions.
More here.
From The National Geographic:
This previously unknown squid was among 80,000 deep-sea organisms collected from the northern Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a chain of undersea mountains halfway between Europe and North America.
The species, dubbed Promachoteuthis sloani, was caught along with around 50 other types of squid during trawls as deep as 1.2 miles (3 kilometers) by a Census of Marine Life team. The team, from the Norwegian-led MAR-ECO program, is investigating life along the world’s ocean mountain ranges. The new species has unusually small, semi-opaque eyes and large numbers of suckers on its arms. The shape of its beak suggests the squid is a powerful chewer, MAR-ECO researchers say.
Around 60,000 of the organisms collected during the Mid-Atlantic Ridge survey were fish, which experts are working to document and identify.
More here.
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
Philip Gourevitch made his name reporting the genocide in Rwanda. Since taking over as editor of the Paris Review, he is bringing reportage to ‘the biggest little magazine in history’.
James Campbell in The Guardian:
In a Paris Review interview almost half a century ago, Ernest Hemingway offered a tip to the would-be writer in search of material: “Let’s say that he should go out and hang himself because he finds that writing well is impossibly difficult. Then he should be cut down with mercy … At least he will have the story of the hanging to go on with.”
It is safe to assume the advice was meant to be taken loosely, but Philip Gourevitch entered into the spirit more boldly than most when, in May 1995, he skipped the hanging and went straight to a genocide. “I stepped up into the open doorway of a classroom,” Gourevitch writes in the opening chapter of We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, his book about the “100 days” of killings of Tutsi people by the dominant Hutus in Rwanda. “At least 50 mostly decomposed cadavers covered the floor, wadded in clothing … Macheted skulls had rolled here and there.” A few paragraphs on, the awestruck reporter, who had never seen dead people before, reacts angrily when his guide steps blithely on skulls as he walks across the grassy courtyard. “Then I heard another crunch, and felt a vibration underfoot. I had stepped on one, too.”
Gourevitch is now the editor of the Paris Review, “the biggest little magazine in history”, as Time magazine called it. The journal is known and admired for its consistent literary talent-spotting and the party-giving panache of its co-founder and editor George Plimpton who died in 2003.
More here.
From the New York Times Magazine:
This month, as in the past five Decembers, the magazine looks back on the passing year from a distinctive vantage point: that of ideas. Our editors and writers have located the peaks and valleys of ingenuity — the human cognitive faculty deployed with intentions good and bad, purposes serious and silly, consequences momentous and morbid. The resulting intellectual mountain range extends across a wide territory. Now it’s yours for the traversing in a compendium of 74 ideas arranged from A to Z.
Patrick Cockburn in CounterPunch:
Few Chinese emperors can have been as impervious to bad news from the front as President George W Bush. His officials were as assiduous as those eunuchs in Beijing 170 years ago in shielding him from bad news. But even when officials familiar with the real situation in Iraq did break through the bureaucratic cordon sanitaire around the Oval Office they got short shrift from Mr Bush. In December 2004 the CIA station chief in Baghdad said that the insurgency was expanding and was “largely unchallenged” in Sunni provinces. Mr Bush’s response was: “What is he, some kind of a defeatist?” A week later the station chief was reassigned.
A few days afterwards, Colonel Derek Harvey, the Defence Intelligence Agency’s senior intelligence officer in Iraq, made much the same point to Mr Bush. He said of the insurgency: “It’s robust, it’s well led, it’s diverse.” According to the US political commentator Sidney Blumenthal, the President at this point turned to his aides and asked: “Is this guy a Democrat?”
More here.
Linda Baker in Seed Magazine:
Portland’s so-called “festival street,” which opened two months ago, is one of a small but growing number of projects in the United States that seek to reclaim streets used by cars as public places for people, too. The strategy is to blur the boundary between pedestrians and automobiles by removing sidewalks and traffic devices, and to create a seamless multi-purpose urban space.
Combining traffic engineering, urban planning and behavioral psychology, the projects are inspired by a provocative new European street design trend known as “psychological traffic calming,” or “shared space.” Upending conventional wisdom, advocates of this approach argue that removing road signs, sidewalks, and traffic lights actually slows cars and is safer for pedestrians. Without any clear right-of-way, so the logic goes, motorists are forced to slow down to safer speeds, make eye contact with pedestrians, cyclists and other drivers, and decide among themselves when it is safe to proceed.
More here.
Emily Watson in Slate:
The Iliad and The Odyssey excite more historical curiosity than most works of literature. To be sure, the poems contain elements that are obviously mythical. In The Odyssey, there are the fabulous, ever-fertile gardens of Alcinoüs, the one-eyed giant Polyphemus, or the bow that nobody but Odysseus can string. Although The Iliad has fewer monsters and marvels, its mode is hardly that of realism. Historians’ accounts of the fortunes of war do not usually include the councils of the gods, who may whisk a favored hero from battle or blind the soldiers with divine mist.
But both poems include details that apparently reflect ordinary life in archaic Greece. There are princes who co-sleep on windy verandas, royal houses with only one chair, babies frightened by war gear, princesses who do the laundry and like playing catch. Ordinary domestic life gets mixed up with mythical exploits. What, then, of the Trojan War itself? Did it ever take place at all? Modern scholarship suggests that the poems do, indeed, reflect historical events—but in a complex and unhistorical way. Rediscovering Homer—a new book by an independent scholar, Andrew Dalby—offers a concise account of the evidence, including ancient Hittite and Egyptian documents, archaic Greek art, and archaeology. His book is helpful as a more-or-less reliable guide and summation of modern Homeric historical study, which should be accessible to readers with no specialist knowledge.
More here.
When R. K. Narayan died, in the spring of 2001 at the age of ninety-four, his legacy seemed assured. Over seven decades of literary activity, he had produced fourteen novels, countless essays, and dozens of stories, the majority of his fiction set in a South Indian town that he called Malgudi. No more a feature of atlases than Trollope’s Barchester, Narayan’s Malgudi put modern Indian writing on the map. For although a handful of Indian novels had been written in English during the nineteenth century, and both Raja Rao and Mulk Raj Anand had found readers for their novels in English by the nineteen-thirties, it was Narayan—two generations before Salman Rushdie—who began to produce the first world-renowned body of work not rendered in any of India’s many vernacular languages. As such, there seemed little risk of hyperbole when Narayan’s obituary in the Guardian said that he was held to be “India’s greatest writer in English of the twentieth century.”
And yet if Narayan’s standing was consistently described in the most vigorous terms, assessments of his writing were less robust. His work was called “charming,” “simple,” “gentle,” “harmless,” “lightly funny,” and “benign”—applause so placid that it was unlikely to wake anyone dozing in the audience. V. S. Naipaul, in a tribute to Narayan in Time, recalled having been “immediately enchanted” by Narayan’s early work, but he seemed perplexed that Narayan, a writer of realist fiction, “was not interested in Indian politics or Indian problems”—that he did not see the India that Naipaul had dubbed “a wounded civilization.”
more from The New Yorker here.
Unless one is a poet, a war hero or a rock star, it is a mistake to die young. James Clerk Maxwell – unlike Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, the two giants of physics with whom he stands – made that mistake, dying in 1879 at the age of just 48. Physicists may be familiar with Maxwell, but most non-scientists, when they switch on their colour TVs or use their mobile phones, are unlikely to realize that he made such technology possible. After all, in 1864 he gave us “Maxwell’s equations” – voted by Physics World readers as their favourite equations of all time – from which radio waves were predicted.
Suppose Maxwell had lived one year beyond the biblical three score and ten. He would then have been alive on 12 December 1901, the day when Guglielmo Marconi, in St John’s, Newfoundland, received the first transatlantic radio signal from a transmitter in Cornwall, UK, designed by Maxwell’s former student Ambrose Fleming. Or consider relativity: mention it and everyone thinks of Einstein. Yet it was Maxwell in 1877 who introduced the term into physics, and had noticed well before then how the interpretation of electromagnetic induction was different depending on whether one considers a magnet approaching a wire loop or a loop approaching a magnet. It was from these “asymmetries that do not appear to be inherent in the phenomena” that Einstein began his work on special relativity.
more from Physics Web here (via TPM).
I must declare an interest. We owe the precarious survival of Georg Büchner’s works to the inspired perspicacity of my great-great-uncle, the Galician-Jewish novelist and publicist Karl Emil Franzos. It was he who began publishing Büchner’s writings in 1878, in the periodical Mehr Licht! – a characteristic homage to Goethe’s mythical last words. Franzos’s editorial labours began in 1875. Virtually no minutiae of textual, biographical, historical information, no particles in the history of Büchner’s reception to this day (there will be one glaring omission) seem to elude Henri and Rosemarie Poschmann, editors of these two volumes. Their edition of Büchner’s Dichtungen, Schriften, Briefe und Dokumente runs to some 2,300 pages on thin paper. Yet, so far as I can make out, they do not tell us how or why Büchner’s fragmentary, often scarcely legible “foul papers” came into Franzos’s caring hands. Nor do they elucidate the awesome clairvoyance which it must have taken at that date to recognize something of Büchner’s stature. My mother, a Viennese grande dame if ever there was, affirmed that it was an apothecary in Lemberg who drew Franzos’s attention to the material, when it ran the risk of becoming waste paper. This may be a family legend. But it would not be out of tune. Büchner’s resurrection is as miraculous as are his creations.
more from the TLS here.
From The National Geographic:
A biblical figure gets a controversial image makeover. A famous TV personality is killed by a stingray. A far-flung planet gets a demotion. These are just a few of the big stories covered this year by National Geographic News. Reload the year in nature, science, and exploration with the most popular news stories of 2006.
1. Lost Gospel Revealed; Says Jesus Asked Judas to Betray Him (April 6)
Hidden for 1,700 years, the Gospel of Judas now offers a surprising take on Christianity’s most reviled man.
More here.
From Nature:
Laughter is indeed infectious, according to a new study. Researchers have shown that the mere sound of giggles tickles the same area of the listener’s brain that is activated when smiling. The brain’s response helps to prepare the facial muscles for a good hearty laugh. “It really seems to be true: ‘Laugh and the whole world laughs with you’,” says study co-author Sophie Scott, a neuroscientist at University College London in the United Kingdom.
The team of played pleasant sounds, such as laughter or cheering, and unpleasant sounds, such as screaming or retching, to volunteers. They then monitored their brains with functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). All the sounds triggered neural responses in the premotor cortex of the brain — an area known to prepare groups of facial muscles to respond accordingly. When a person in the study actually smiled or laughed, the neural activity moved to a primary motor cortical region.
More here.
Tuesday, December 12, 2006
In Slate, Hitchens on the late Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet (1915-2006):
Pinochet ended up like Spain’s Gen. Francisco Franco, with a series of deathbed farewells that were obscenely protracted and attended by numerous priests and offerings of extreme unction. By the end, Chileans had become wearily used to the way in which he fell dramatically ill whenever the workings of justice took a step nearer to his archives or his bank accounts. Like Franco, too, he long outlived his own regime and survived to see his country outgrow the tutelage to which he had subjected it. And, also like Franco, he earned a place in history as a treasonous and ambitious officer who was false to his oath to defend and uphold the constitution. His overthrow of civilian democracy, in the South American country in which it was most historically implanted, will always be remembered as one of the more shocking crimes of the 20th century.
His coup—mounted on Sept. 11, 1973, for those who like to study numinous dates—was a crime in itself but involved countless other crimes as well. Over the past decade, and especially since his arrest in England in 1998, these crimes began to catch up with him. Pinochet had arranged a lifetime immunity for himself via a lifelong Senate seat, as part of his phased withdrawal from power. But this deal was not binding on Spain, where a magistrate successfully sought a warrant for his arrest in connection with the “disappearance” of some Spanish citizens. That warrant from Judge Baltasar Garzón, served in London, was the beginning of the unraveling. By the time he returned to Chile, the general was faced with a newly aroused citizenry. I once went to testify in front of Judge Juan Gúzman, the magistrate who finally ordered him indicted and fingerprinted. He told me that he himself had been a supporter of the original coup and that he came from a conservative military family that had thought of Pinochet as a savior. It was only when he read through the massive and irrefutable judicial files, on murder and torture and kidnapping, that he realized that there was only one course open to him.
I will start with a personal story that I have told several times before. In 1993, I taught in Germany as a lecturer in Bulgarian language and literature at the university of Göttingen. One day, I was invited to a German student party together with a friend of mine, a Yugoslavian PhD student, who during the siege of Sarajevo realized that she is Bosnian and Moslem and became an anti-war activist. We decided to have a bite to eat before the party. Faced with the difficult choice between Italian, German, Chinese, and French restaurants, we chose – with a slight hint of shame – to go to a Greek tavern and enjoy the native culinary pleasures. Eating moussaka and souvlaki (not at all different from the Bulgarian-Serbian-Macedonian-Turkish shish kebab), we watched the weather forecast for Europe on the restaurant’s TV. The borders of the separate countries were delineated with white contours. For no apparent reason, Romania and Bulgaria appeared as one country with Bucharest as the capital. At the end of our dinner, we asked the Greek waiter for Turkish coffee – he said, however, that in this restaurant they only offered Greek coffee. We ordered it – it was the same “Ottoman” type: sweet and thick, unsuited to the German taste for filtered coffee, nevertheless known in Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, Bosnia, and Turkey as Turkish coffee.
more from Eurozine here.
In 1927 Paul Valéry wrote that Europe dreams of being ruled by an American Commission, and for many Europeans America is still seen as having an enviable freedom from the burdens of the past. There may be few who would now want to be subject to American rule but there are still many who see America as standing for a kind of freedom and equality to which Europeans can still only aspire. It is a view as common on the left of politics as on the right. There seem to be plenty of ex-communists and former Trotskyites who regard the United States with a loyalty and reverence of a sort they once reserved for the Soviet Union, and who round on critics of US policies as enemies of progress. Right across the spectrum of opinion America is seen as the supreme modern society, which more than any other embodies the future.
If any one writer can be said to be responsible for this view, it must be Alexis de Tocqueville. This acutely observant, high-strung French nobleman has been hugely influential in disseminating the idea that America is the country in whose path all others are bound – sooner or later, one way or another – to follow.
more from Literary Review here.
I’LL BEGIN WITH THE BULLET HOLES. They were small, but by no means discreet, and surely everyone who visited the UCLA Hammer Museum in early 2006 saw them, pocking the lower flanks of Jean Prouvé’s prefabricated steel-and-aluminum Tropical House, 1951/2005–2006, which had been retrieved from its original site in the former French Congo and reassembled in the museum’s courtyard. At first glance, the structure had a quaint dioramic quality, like a life-size colonial dollhouse for a make-believe attaché, an impression that was only enhanced by the leafy bamboo plants that surrounded it. But then I noticed the holes, ominous punctures in the logic and presentation of an otherwise perfectly self-contained architectural relic. Given the meticulous restoration, it was clear the perforations had been left intentionally unrepaired, as if to preserve the contradictions inherent in memorializing such a prototype, whose innovations and “functionality” pertain pointedly to France’s colonial past: Prouvé’s “machine for living” was easily shipped, quick to put up or take down, and equipped with a ventilation system that promised comfort to the European unused to equatorial climates.
more from artforum here.
From The Harvard Gazette:
The nonviolent principles of Mohandas Gandhi may be the only way to bring peace to the world, Gandhi’s granddaughter said. Human rights activist and former South African member of parliament Ela Gandhi told about 160 people gathered in Harvard Law School’s Pound Hall that violent victory sows the seeds of its own destruction. It is only through nonviolent resistance and dispute resolution, the focus of Mohandas Gandhi’s Satyagraha philosophy, that the world can become a peaceful place, she said.
Susan Hackley, the Program on Negotiation’s managing director, said Mohandas Gandhi’s principles provided the foundation for later movements by celebrated leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, and Lech Walesa. “The history of the last 100 years includes some breathtaking success stories … [by leaders who] brought about profound change without violence,” Hackley said. “All of these leaders would no doubt declare they owe a great debt to one person who 100 years ago developed a method and a philosophy for dealing with oppression that showed them how to stand up to overwhelming force.”
More here.
