Paul Auster should not exist. I say this not to mimic a sentence that might easily have been plucked from one of his own hall-of-mirrors fictions, but simply to note his singular position in contemporary American letters. He has enjoyed unlikely success by writing reflexive novels that take up notions of chance and fate, memory and oblivion, luck and the uncanny; given his self-referential leanings and taste for highbrow allusion, it might seem that he would at best have found a coterie of admirers and a university appointment to subsidize his writing. Instead, he has settled comfortably into a career as one of the most glamorous novelists in America. Abroad, he has even higher visibility, a genuine rock-star aura. Magazine profiles cite his movie-idol looks and general air of suave elegance, and although Park Slope, the Brooklyn neighborhood where he lives, may now be home to more writers than any other urban enclave on the planet, he stands out in his affiliation with the place as one of its presiding celebrities. He has branched out into subsidiary projects as a radio personality (having headed up a few years back NPR’s National Story Project, which solicited anecdotal tales from listeners nationwide, later collected in the anthology I Thought My Father Was God [2001]) and a screenwriter and film director: Best known in this regard for his screenplay for 1995’s Smoke (directed by Wayne Wang), Auster has written and directed the rather stilted Lulu on the Bridge (1998) and the just-completed The Inner Life of Martin Frost, based on material from his novel The Book of Illusions (2002). His work has also proliferated into media of unimpeachable hipness: Paul Karasik and David Mazzuchelli adapted City of Glass (1985), the first book in Auster’s New York Trilogy, into a graphic novel in 1994, and the beguiling, mischievous French artist Sophie Calle has realized conceptual pieces based on his writings. These extraliterary manifestations contribute to a highly resilient cultural persona, gracing him, if you will, with a street credibility among chic young bookish types that has sustained Auster through an uneven career.

more from Bookforum here.

When John le Carré published A Perfect Spy in 1986, Philip Roth, then spending a lot of time in London, called it ‘the best English novel since the war’. Not being such a fan of A Perfect Spy, I’ve occasionally wondered what Roth’s generous blurb says about the postwar English novel. As a le Carré bore, however, I’ve also wondered how Roth managed to overlook Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), the central novel in le Carré’s career, in which George Smiley – an outwardly diffident ex-spook with a strenuously unfaithful wife and an interest in 17th-century German literature – comes out of retirement to identify the turncoat in a secret service that’s explicitly presented as a metaphorical ‘vision of the British establishment at play’. If you sit up late enough watching DVDs of the BBC adaptation starring Alec Guinness, or Martin Ritt’s version of The Spy who Came in from the Cold with Richard Burton, it’s possible to persuade yourself that le Carré might even be the greatest English novelist alive. Unfortunately, looking at his other books the next morning makes this seem less likely, in part because the classic phase of his career ended earlier than we bores like to remember, and in part because some of his early strengths have become, in a changed context, weaknesses.

more from the LRB here.

Every weekday, a truck pulls up to the Cecil H. Green Library, on the campus of Stanford University, and collects at least a thousand books, which are taken to an undisclosed location and scanned, page by page, into an enormous database being created by Google. The company is also retrieving books from libraries at several other leading universities, including Harvard and Oxford, as well as the New York Public Library. At the University of Michigan, Google’s original partner in Google Book Search, tens of thousands of books are processed each week on the company’s custom-made scanning equipment.

Google intends to scan every book ever published, and to make the full texts searchable, in the same way that Web sites can be searched on the company’s engine at google.com. At the books site, which is up and running in a beta (or testing) version, at books.google.com, you can enter a word or phrase—say, Ahab and whale—and the search returns a list of works in which the terms appear, in this case nearly eight hundred titles, including numerous editions of Herman Melville’s novel.

more from The New Yorker here.

From Scientific American:

It sounds like something straight out of a video game: A snake collects toxin by biting a poisonous toad and uses that venom as a defense against hawks and other predators. But that is exactly what researchers say the Asian snake Rhabdophis tigrinus does, based on studies of glandular fluid from hatchlings and adult snakes on two Japanese islands.

Some R. tigrinus snakes carry toxins called bufadienolides in their nuchal glands, sacks located under a ridge of skin along their upper necks. When threatened, they arch their necks, exposing the poisonous ridge to an antagonist. The clawing and biting of hawks and other predators most likely rips the skin and lets the poison ooze out, potentially blinding the snake’s attackers, says herpetologist Deborah Hutchinson of Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va. “It might not kill the predator but it would be noxious enough to deter predation,” she says.

More here.

From BBC News:

The finds caused a sensation when they were announced to the world in 2004. But some researchers argued the bones belonged to a modern human with a combination of small stature and a brain disorder called microcephaly. That claim is rejected by the latest study, which compares the tiny people with modern microcephalics. Microcephaly is a rare pathological condition in humans characterised by a small brain and cognitive impairment.

In the new study, Dean Falk, of Florida State University, and her colleagues say the remains are those of a completely separate human species: Homo floresiensis. They have published their findings in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The remains at the centre of the Hobbit controversy were discovered at Liang Bua, a limestone cave on the Indonesian island of Flores, in 2003.

More here.

Firoze Shakir. Muharram in Lucknow. Ya Sakina Ya Abbas.

“This is a chant that rips through the air on Aathvi after burying the Chup tazia, and along with Ya Hussain Ya Hussain the Azreens do an unforgettable Matam.”

More on this particular series here.

Muharram in Karbala here.

FS has a unique, informative and broad ranging gallery of photographs here.

Recently, my wife and I have been avid watchers of chef Anthony Bourdain‘s program No Reservations on the Travel Channel (get cable, will you? And then get TIVO, too–trust me), and as I see Tony visit exotic locales and sample their various culinary offerings, I always wonder why he never replied to the late-nite letter that I once wrote him inviting him to dinner at my house, even promising to get my nephew Asad Raza to cook the incomparably zesty-yet-subtle, and completely sui generis, Pakistani dish, Nihari, for him. Now, let me tell you, Asad cooks a mean Nihari, but even the NM (Nihari Master) must go to the source for inspiration and instruction once in a while, and Asad not only went to Burns Road in Karachi (read about some of his other activities while he was there, here), he recorded his visit on video for the rest of us. So, Tony, either go to Pakistan, or come over to my place for some of Asad’s Nihari, and meanwhile, watch this video which made my mouth water (and my heart ache):

In The Nation, Terry Eagleton reviews Barbara Ehrenreich’s Dancing in the Streets.

Western liberals who are besotted with the Other should read E.M. Forster’s mischievous little novel Where Angels Fear to Tread. The well-bred young English heroine of this tale runs off with a rather roughneck young Italian, to the horror of her priggish, xenophobic, stiff-necked family. Yet just as the reader is relishing the family’s discomfort, an equally discomforting realization begins to dawn. The young Italian turns out to be an appalling brute. The parochially minded prigs were right after all.

Barbara Ehrenreich’s Dancing in the Streets refuses to fall for the romance of the Other, though its subject–popular festivity versus puritanical order–might well have tempted her to. What we have instead is an admirably lucid, level-headed history of outbreaks of collective joy from Dionysus to the Grateful Dead. It is a book that investigates orgy but declines quite properly to join in. For one thing, it recognizes in its impressively unromantic way that most carnivalesque activity over the centuries has been planned rather than spontaneous, rather as rock concerts are today. For another thing, unlike the more dewy-eyed apostles of dancing in the streets, it recognizes that popular carnival has a darker, violent dimension. In wisely agnostic manner, Ehrenreich refuses to take sides in the debate about whether carnival is a licensed displacement of popular energies (“There is no slander in an allowed fool,” remarks Olivia in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night), or whether it is a case of the plebeians rehearsing the uprising.

(And via Virtual Philosopher) an online conference on Danto’s The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, 25 years later. The schedule can be found here. From Richard Shusterman’s keynote:

I first encountered Arthur Danto’s philosophy as an undergraduate in Jerusalem in the early 1970s, in a course on analytic aesthetics, where we also studied the texts of Monroe Beardsley, Nelson Goodman, Richard Wollheim, George Dickie, and Joseph Margolis. Each of these philosophers has a distinctive voice, and it was not Danto’s but Nelson Goodman’s that initially won my heart and inspired my philosophical ambitions. So inseparable was his red-covered Languages of Art from my person that friends jokingly described it, with reference to Chairman Mao’s current eminence, as my little red book of cultural revolution. Goodman’s austerely uncompromising nominalism, his lean, hard-fisted logical style, his confident, even arrogant tone of conviction all appealed to me as a young Israeli shaped by that culture’s military virtues. The infatuation did not survive my doctoral studies in Oxford, and my unqualified zeal for analytic philosophy did not survive my encounter with pragmatism in the early 1990s. Now, after more than thirty years of engagement with analytic aesthetics (both from the inside and from the critical perspective of the pragmatist aesthetics I advocate), I regard Danto as having its most alluringly potent oeuvre. This paper is, in part, an effort to explain why.

Several factors contribute to Danto’s greatness and collectively conspire to take him beyond those other prominent analytic aestheticians of his generation whose conceptual and argumentative skills seem every bit as impressive and who are likewise capable of systematic philosophy. First is his lovingly intimate engagement with the visual arts, though this is something that Wollheim and Goodman certainly shared. Another factor is Danto’s superior literary style – artfully belle-lettrist but never artificial, colorful and free-flowing without sacrificing logical form, bold but not bullying in its argumentation, imaginative but not eccentric, sophisticated and complex yet easy to follow, professional but not pedantic, precise enough to satisfy the philosophical expert but sufficiently flexible and broadly comprehensible to convey its message to any intellectual interested in the arts. There is also the vibrant passion that pervades Danto’s aesthetic imagination, a passion as richly inflected with the erotic as the philosophical, fusing his sensuous and intellectual perceptions to make his arguments intriguingly compelling even when their logical architecture seems slim and shadowy in pure conceptual terms.

(Via Political Theory Daily Review) the Virtual Philosopher interviews Simon Blackburn:

Nigel: Since returning to England from the States, taking up a professorial chair in Cambridge, you have been prolific as a writer of popular philosophy books: Think, Being Good, Lust, and most recently Truth. Is there a particular reason for this apparent change of direction?

Simon: Actually Think was published a couple of years before I left the States, and Being Good was finished before I did so. So if there was a change in direction, I suppose it was while I was in the States. It is a change of emphasis, I think, more than a change of direction. I have always had a democratic streak: one of my earliest books, published in 1984, was supposed to be an introduction to the philosophy of language (Spreading The Word). But I also like to blend some of my own attempts at philosophy into supposedly introductory books, so for instance that book was quite influential in its moral theory, and to some extent in what it said about other things such as rule-following and truth. I try to keep on publishing “professional” papers while I also produce books like these.

Nigel: David Hume in his essay writing saw himself as an ambassador from the ‘dominions of learning to those of conversation’. Is that a position that you now identify with? Who are you writing for? Do you know who reads your books?

Simon: As so often, Hume puts it better than I could myself. Yes, that’s an admirable description of a position I identify with. I think professional philosophy can be very odd, very self-contained and narcissistic and quite out of touch with more general cultural currents. Its writings, as Bernard Williams memorably put it, can often resemble “scientific reports badly translated from the Martian”. I think good philosophy always has had to take some nourishment from surrounding politics, moral concerns, and science. It may be harder to identify what it returns, but in my books I try at least to exhibit something it can give back.

Michael Pollan in the NYT Magazine:

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy. I hate to give away the game right here at the beginning of a long essay, and I confess that I’m tempted to complicate matters in the interest of keeping things going for a few thousand more words. I’ll try to resist but will go ahead and add a couple more details to flesh out the advice. Like: A little meat won’t kill you, though it’s better approached as a side dish than as a main. And you’re much better off eating whole fresh foods than processed food products. That’s what I mean by the recommendation to eat “food.” Once, food was all you could eat, but today there are lots of other edible foodlike substances in the supermarket. These novel products of food science often come in packages festooned with health claims, which brings me to a related rule of thumb: if you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid food products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.

Uh-oh. Things are suddenly sounding a little more complicated, aren’t they? Sorry. But that’s how it goes as soon as you try to get to the bottom of the whole vexing question of food and health. Before long, a dense cloud bank of confusion moves in. Sooner or later, everything solid you thought you knew about the links between diet and health gets blown away in the gust of the latest study.

Last winter came the news that a low-fat diet, long believed to protect against breast cancer, may do no such thing — this from the monumental, federally financed Women’s Health Initiative, which has also found no link between a low-fat diet and rates of coronary disease. The year before we learned that dietary fiber might not, as we had been confidently told, help prevent colon cancer. Just last fall two prestigious studies on omega-3 fats published at the same time presented us with strikingly different conclusions. While the Institute of Medicine stated that “it is uncertain how much these omega-3s contribute to improving health” (and they might do the opposite if you get them from mercury-contaminated fish), a Harvard study declared that simply by eating a couple of servings of fish each week (or by downing enough fish oil), you could cut your risk of dying from a heart attack by more than a third — a stunningly hopeful piece of news. It’s no wonder that omega-3 fatty acids are poised to become the oat bran of 2007, as food scientists micro-encapsulate fish oil and algae oil and blast them into such formerly all-terrestrial foods as bread and tortillas, milk and yogurt and cheese, all of which will soon, you can be sure, sprout fishy new health claims. (Remember the rule?)

This is a very interesting video presentation I found at Lindsay Beyerstein’s Majikthise:

From MSNBC:

Religion and science can combine to create some thorny questions: Does God exist outside the human mind, or is God a creation of our brains? Why do we have faith in things that we cannot prove, whether it’s the afterlife or UFOs? The new Center for Spirituality and the Mind at the University of Pennsylvania is using brain imaging technology to examine such questions, and to investigate how spiritual and secular beliefs affect our health and behavior. Newberg’s center is not a bricks-and-mortar structure but a multidisciplinary team of Penn researchers exploring the relationship between the brain and spirituality from biological, psychological, social and ideological viewpoints.

How does the center test the relationship between the mind and spirituality? In one study, Newberg and colleagues used imaging technology to look at the brains of Pentecostal Christians speaking in tongues — known scientifically as glossolalia — then looked at their brains when they were singing gospel music. They found that those practicing glossolalia showed decreased activity in the brain’s language center, compared with the singing group.

More here.

From The National Geographic:

Flaring the gills that give the species its name, a frilled shark swims at Japan’s Awashima Marine Park on Sunday, January 21, 2007. Sightings of living frilled sharks are rare, because the fish generally remain thousands of feet beneath the water’s surface. Spotted by a fisher on January 21, this 5.3-foot (160-centimeter) shark was transferred to the marine park, where it was placed in a seawater pool. “We think it may have come to the surface because it was sick, or else it was weakened because it was in shallow waters,” a park official told the Reuters news service. But the truth may never be known, since the “living fossil” died hours after it was caught.

More here.

Witold Rybczynski in Slate:

The new de Young museum in San Francisco, which opened in 2005, replaces a Spanish-style building that had been insensitively “modernized” in 1949, fatally weakened by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, and finally demolished in 2003. Despite billing itself as a “museum of the 21^st century,” the new building has many of the hallmarks of a 19^th-century art gallery: skylights, separate wings for different collections, landscaped courtyards, and a grand staircase. What is decidedly unconventional, in this age of extrovert cultural institutions, is the exterior appearance, which, from a distance, is slightly forbidding, uncommunicative, almost grim.

Unusual exterior cladding is something of a trademark of the primary design architects, the Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron, who have previously used skins of twisted copper strips, printed acrylic, and silk-screened glass and concrete. The walls of the de Young are paper-thin copper panels, both dimpled and perforated. The dimples—concave and convex—create changing textures, while the perforations, which vary in size and density, emphasize the thinness and create the effect of a scrim. Like the exteriors of many recent buildings (Zaha Hadid’s Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, Daniel Libeskind’s Denver Art Museum, Herzog & de Meuron’s own addition to the Walker Art Gallery), the walls neither reveal structure nor express inner organization. Instead, the patterns are purely ornamental, which makes them curiously similar in function to the moldings and decorations on the exteriors of classical buildings. The trend suggests just how far from its Modernist roots the current generation of architects has strayed.

More here.

Irene Khan, secretary general of Amnesty International, blogging from the World Economic Forum in Davos:

In true WEF style, a galaxy of stars – from Blair to Bono and Bill Gates, from Thabo Mbeki, the President of South Africa, to Ellen Sirleaf Johnson, the President of Liberia and the first woman head of state in Africa – sat around the table, with lesser luminaries like Paul Wolfowitz, the President of the World Bank, and Joseph Stiglitz, the award-winning economist in the row, directly behind them.

The subject was “Delivering on the Promise of Africa”. While everyone agreed that the promise was being marred by crippling debt, rampant corruption, weak commitment by both western and African leaders and the lack of capacity in Africa, the round table exuded a sense of optimism and hope for the future.

It was an inspiring debate. The two African Presidents and the African NGO representative emphasised the leadership and participation of Africans themselves.

Bono called Africa “an adventure and an opportunity”; for Blair, it was a “strategic interest”. Ogata believed that it was possible to have an African miracle.

It was left to Ogata, the former UN High Commissioner for Refugees, to remind all of us that Africa must be made refugee-free and that the carnage in Darfur must be stopped.

It was the first time that anyone had mentioned Darfur in Davos. A human rights and humanitarian catastrophe – that has left millions displaced, killed, raped with impunity – is nowhere to be found on the agenda of WEF. Business leaders see no commercial interest in that part of Sudan. Political leaders would prefer not to be reminded of the limits of their own impotence.

More here.

The superstores are suddenly competing to be green. Can we trust them?

George Monbiot in The Guardian:

You batter your head against the door until you begin to wonder whether it is a door at all. Suddenly it opens, and you find yourself flying through space. The superstores’ green conversion is astonishing, wonderful, disorienting. If Tesco and Walmart have become friends of the earth, are any enemies left?

These were the most arrogant of the behemoths. They have trampled their suppliers, their competitors and even their regulators. They have smashed local economies, broken the backs of the farmers, forced their contractors to drive down wages, shrugged off complaints with a superciliousness born of the knowledge that they were unchallengeable. For them, it seemed, there was no law beyond the market, no place too precious to be destroyed, no cost they could not pass to someone else.

We environmentalists developed a picture of the world which seemed to be repeatedly confirmed by experience. Big corporations destroy the environment. They are the enemies of society. The bigger they become, the less they can be constrained by either democracy or consumer power. The politics of scale permit them to bully governments, tear up standards, reshape the world to suit themselves.

More here.

Anyone with a claim to literacy is familiar with the names of Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky, and can cite some of the titles of their most famous works. But Goncharov and his novel Oblomov, of which a new translation, a snappily colloquial and readable one, has just been published–who ever heard of them? Well, Beckett for one, who was told to read Oblomov by his mistress Peggy Guggenheim, and soon signed some of his letters to her with this cognomen. I recall my teacher at the University of Chicago long ago, the renowned classicist David Grene, who had been a fellow student of Beckett’s at Trinity College, Dublin, telling me that the future famous writer was well-known as a very late riser and missed classes for this reason. Since the main character of Oblomov also finds it very difficult to leave his couch–whether he succeeds in doing so or not (literally as well as symbolically) constitutes the main thread of the extremely tenuous action of the novel–Beckett’s instant attraction to this character is easily comprehensible. There is also good reason to believe that the figure in Waiting for Godot bearing the Russian name of Vladimir is a tribute to this unexpectedly Slavic aspect of Beckett.

more from TNR here.

Over the last few years, and especially since the American invasion of Iraq in March 2003, there have been indications across the world of a growing convergence between the forces of Islamist militancy, on the one hand, and the ‘anti-imperialist’ left on the other. Leaving aside widespread, if usually unarticulated, sympathy for the attacks of September 11, 2001, justified on the grounds that “the Americans deserved it,” we have seen since 2003 an overt coincidence of policies, with considerable support for the Iraqi “resistance,” which includes strong Islamist elements, and, more recently and even more explicitly, support for Hezbollah in Lebanon. In the Middle East itself, and on parts of the European far left, an overt alliance with Islamists has been established, going back at least to the mass demonstrations in early 2003 that preceded the Iraq War, but also including a convergence of slogans on Palestine–supporting suicide bombings and denying the legitimacy of the Israeli state. Last year, for example, radical Basque demonstrators were preceded by a militant waving a Hezbollah flag. Moreover, since most of those who oppose the U.S. action in Iraq of 2003 also opposed the war in Afghanistan in 2001, this leads, whether clearly recognized or not, to support for the anti-Western Taliban, armed groups now active across that country.

more from Dissent here.

Kenneth Koch once said of his early poems that he wanted to keep the subject in the air as much as possible, because any subject, according to Wittgenstein, is a limitation of the world. But Koch, who died in 2002, knew that a subject emerges sooner or later, so it makes sense that he would choose happiness, an expansive one, as his own. In the long poem “Seasons on Earth,” he writes that he thought about happiness “As being at one’s side, so that one [had] but / To bend or turn to get to it . . .” This obsession, amply displayed in the near-simultaneous publication of his Collected Poems and Collected Fiction, began as a reaction to the suffocating aesthetic of what he saw as New Critical drips—poets Koch referred to as “the castrati”—who thought suffering the only form of intense feeling. For Koch, it was unethical to deny any part of experience, which is why his poems ask us time and again what it means to lead a good life—with “good” meaning both pleasurable and ethical. In the broad view of his career that these new books afford, we see Koch preserving the comic as a serious way of arriving at “ecstasy, unity, freedom, completeness, dionysiac things,” poetic ambitions he talks about in a 1995 interview with the poet Jordan Davis, his student and the editor of his Collected Fiction.

more from Boston Review here.