North By Northwest isn’t a film about what happens to Cary Grant, it’s about what happens to his suit. The suit has the adventures, a gorgeous New York suit threading its way through America. The title sequence in which the stark lines of a Madison Avenue office building are ‘woven’ together could be the construction of Cary in his suit right there—he gets knitted into his suit, into his job, before our very eyes. Indeed some of the popular ‘suitings’ of that time (‘windowpane’ or ‘glen plaid’) perfectly complemented office buildings. Cary’s suit reflects New York, identifies him as a thrusting exec, but also arms him, protects him: what else is a suit for? Reflects and Protectsæa slogan Cary’s character, Roger Thornhill, might have come up with himself.

more from Granta here.

I credit the “emo flu.” If I hadn’t been stricken by this strange affliction going around, I wouldn’t have taken to bed with a pile of spy novels and emerged determined to convince you that Philip Kerr is the contemporary master of the morally complex thriller.

But first, a word about this flu. It was the strangest I’ve ever gotten, and I’m not alone in thinking it was weird. Indeed, I feel compelled to alert the world, or at least this city, about the extraordinarily subtle and insidious sequelae of this contagion going around.

more from Ron Rsoenbaum at the NY Observer here.

O fold me away between blankets
And leave me alone.
And let the door of my room be locked forever –
Never to be opened, even for you, should you come.

Red wool and soft bed. Every chink definitely sealed.
Not a book by my bed – no, not one book.
Instead, at all times, there, just in reach,
Gorgeous patisseries and a bottle of Madeira.

more from Ted Hughes’ previously unpublished translations of Mário de Sá Carneiro, Paul Eluard, Lorenzo de Medici and Federico García Lorca at the TLS here.

From The Chronicle Review:

In Why Arendt Matters (Yale University Press, 2006), a staunchly devotional brief for the continuing relevance of political theorist Hannah Arendt, by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Arendt’s much-acclaimed biographer, the author complains that despite writing “more than a dozen dense volumes” that include several “masterpieces of political analysis,” and posthumously becoming “the subject of hundreds of books and articles,” Arendt “lives on in newspeak through just four words.”

“The banality of evil.”

Young-Bruehl brandishes the phrase at the outset, lamenting, “This is the sound bite by which Hannah Arendt has become popularly known.” What, the noted psychoanalyst asks, “do people make of it when, every time some especially appalling, hard-to-fathom mass crime takes place, ‘the banality of evil’ turns up in their morning papers or jumps out of the mouths of TV pundits?”

A former Ph.D. student of Arendt at the New School, Young-Bruehl grieves at how The New York Times Week in Review juxtaposed photos of Adolf Eichmann and Saddam Hussein at their respective trials with the caption, “From Banality to Audacity.” It accompanied a story in which Arendt’s phrase “was predictably and reverently invoked — and completely misunderstood.”

More here.

From The Guardian:

Primo Levi’s haunting memoir of life as a Jew in Mussolini’s Italy told through the unlikely metaphor of chemistry has been named the best science book ever written. The Periodic Table, published in 1975, fought off competition from Richard Dawkins, DNA legend James Watson, Tom Stoppard, Bertolt Brecht and Charles Darwin to win the vote at an event organised by the Royal Institution in London.

“This book pinions my awareness to the solidity of the world around me,” said former Guardian science editor Tim Radford, who was the book’s advocate at the event. “The science book is the ultimate in non-fiction,” he told the Guardian’s weekly science podcast. “You’ve got the entire universe and the entire sub-atomic world to choose from and everything that has happened in it.”

Levi survived Auschwitz and later became a chemist in postwar Italy before committing suicide in 1987.

His memoir narrowly beat Stoppard’s play Arcadia and King Solomon’s Ring, the ecologist Konrad Lorenz’s 1952 eulogy to the natural world, a book described by the event’s chair, author Jon Turney, as “the most charming ever written by a Nazi”.

More here.

Michael Luo in the New York Times:

Nearly every night here for the past month, Iraqis weary of the tumult around them have been turning on the television to watch a wacky-looking man with a giant Afro wig and star-shaped glasses deliver the grim news of the day.

In a recent episode, the host, Saad Khalifa, reported that Iraq’s Ministry of Water and Sewage had decided to change its name to simply the Ministry of Sewage — because it had given up on the water part.

In another episode, he jubilantly declared that “Rums bin Feld” had announced American troops were leaving the country on 1/1, in other words, on Jan. 1. His face crumpled when he realized he had made a mistake. The troops were not actually departing on any specific date, he clarified, but instead leaving one by one. At that rate, it would take more than 600 years for them to be gone.

The newscast is a parody, of course, that fires barbs at everyone from the American military to the Iraqi government, an Iraqi version of “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart.” Even the militias wreaking havoc on Iraq are lampooned.

More here.

“East and west face each other across a divide that some call a religious war. Suicide jihadis take what they see as defensive action and innocent people are killed. But this is 1857.”

William Dalrymple on lessons from the Raj for the neo-cons, in the New Statesman:

The Siege of Delhi was a fight to the death between two powers, neither of whom could retreat. Finally, on 14 September 1857, the British assaulted and took the city, sacking the Mughal capital and massacring swathes of the population. “The orders went out to shoot every soul,” recorded Edward Vibart, a 19-year-old British officer. “It was literally murder . . . The women were all spared but their screams, on seeing their husbands and sons butchered, were most painful . . . I feel no pity, but when some old grey bearded man is brought and shot before your very eyes, hard must be that man’s heart I think who can look on with indifference . . .”

Delhi was left an empty ruin. Those city-dwellers who survived were driven out into the countryside to fend for themselves. Though the royal family had surrendered peacefully, most of the emperor’s 16 sons were tried and hanged, while three were shot in cold blood, having first freely given up their arms, then been told to strip naked. “In 24 hours I disposed of the principal members of the house of Timur the Tartar,” Captain William Hodson wrote to his sister the following day. “I am not cruel, but I confess I did enjoy the opportunity of ridding the earth of these wretches.”

More here.  [Image shows the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar.]

Johnny Dymond at the BBC News:

Finland is one of the quieter members of the EU. But now its turn at the EU presidency has thrust it into the spotlight – and exposed an unusual passion.

Like the boy at the party with cheese straws stuck up his nose, it has been caught doing something vaguely disturbing – indulging a penchant for Latin.

It is the only country in the world which broadcasts the news in Latin.

On its EU presidency website one can find descriptions of meetings in Latin. But love of the language of Rome goes deep.

More here.

The Russian radical writer and philosopher Alexander Herzen loved Rome for its warmth and spontaneity, but he was a little chagrined to find himself there when the revolution of 1848 erupted in Paris, seven hundred miles away. Luckily, the Romans were equal to the event. As Herzen watched, they gathered at the embassy of the oppressive Austrians, pulled down the enormous imperial coat of arms, stomped on it, then hitched it to a donkey and dragged it through the streets. “An amazing time,” Herzen wrote to his Russian friends. “My hand shakes when I pick up a paper, every day there is something unexpected, some peal of thunder.” He raced to Paris, where the provisional government was handing out grants, like some gonzo arts foundation, to anyone willing to spread the revolution abroad. Herzen’s old friend the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin had already started east to foment revolution against the Tsar; another friend, the German Romantic poet Georg Herwegh, was raising a battalion of émigré workers and intellectuals to march on Baden-Baden. Herzen stayed in Paris to see what would happen next.

more from the New Yorker here.

I used to underestimate the optical juju in the paintings of Mark Grotjahn (pronounced Groat-john). When he first showed in New York, about five years ago, I privately dismissed the art of this Los Angeles-based painter as alluring but repetitious, overly simple, and too op. Now I think he may be painting a sort of unstable parallax vision where space oscillates and perspective is disrupted. Whatever he’s doing, I suddenly can’t see enough of his work. The Whitney Museum’s current lobby show, organized by associate curator Shamim Momin, of eight large drawings by Grotjahn–though it may feature too many monochromes and it’s a real shame there are no paintings on hand–proves that even though this artist is repetitious, his work is far from simple. It is more than alluring, even a little insurrectionary in its implications.

more from The Village Voice here.

Lucas Samaras, a self-proclaimed narcissist — a narcissist in a long line of avant-garde narcissists — but one who, like all narcissistic flashers, needs a public to acknowledge the importance of his existence (and especially his body), has come up, in his latest tour de force iFilm Ecdysiast, with the perfect audience: other artists (Jasper Johns and Claus Oldenburg among them) and art people (critics and museum people) and, of course, his long-time dealer Arne Glimcher. They all once posed nude for him (Sittings, 1978-81), and in Ecdysiast he turns the tables on them: on one wall of the installation we see him on a video screen, taking off his clothes in excruciatingly slow motion, and on the opposite wall, we see the faces of the audience, each framed on a video screen of its own — they’re clearly an exclusive club, but they’re all very individualistic, not to say incommensurate egomaniacs, which is why each needs a space of his or her own (like Samaras, who can only relate to them from a distance and by using them in his art) — watching Samaras do his strip tease. The faces are solemn and sober, full of fake and impatient interest, none cracking a smile until the end, probably more out of relief that the 5½-minute ordeal was over than in amusement at Samaras’ antics.

more from Artnet magazine here.

Via Counterpunch, Fernando Botero’s paintings and drawings on Abu Ghraib, at the Marlborough Gallery in Manhattan.

In the wake of the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Grameen, some more critical looks at microlending:

[Walden Bello in The Nation] There is no doubt that Yunus, a Bangladeshi economist, came up with a winning idea that has transformed the lives of many millions of poor women, and perhaps for that alone, he deserves the Nobel Prize. But Yunus–at least the young Yunus, who did not have the support of global institutions when he started out–did not see his Grameen Bank as a panacea. Others, like the World Bank and the United Nations, elevated it to that status (and, some say, convinced Yunus it was a panacea), and microcredit is now presented as a relatively painless approach to development. Through its dynamics of collective responsibility for repayment by a group of women borrowers, microcredit has indeed allowed many poor women to roll back pervasive poverty. However, it is mainly the moderately poor rather than the very poor who benefit, and not very many can claim they have permanently left the instability of poverty. Likewise, not many would claim that the degree of self-sufficiency and the ability to send children to school afforded by microcredit are indicators of their graduating to middle-class prosperity. As economic journalist Gina Neff notes, “after 8 years of borrowing, 55% of Grameen households still aren’t able to meet their basic nutritional needs–so many women are using their loans to buy food rather than invest in business.”

And Alexander Cockburn in Counterpunch:

[W]hat have microloans achieved? I put the question to P. Sainath, author of Everybody Loves a Good Drought and India’s most outstanding journalist on rural destitution and the consequences of economic policy. Yes, he said, microloans can be a legitimate tool in certain conditions, as long as you don’t elevate the tool into a gigantic weapon. No one was ever liberated by being placed in debt. That said, a lot of poor women have eased their lives by using microloans, bypassing bank bureaucracies and money lenders…

Sainath points out that the interest rates micro-indebted women are paying in India are far higher than commercial bank lending rates.

“They are paying between 24 and 36 per cent on loans for productive expenditures while an upper class person can finance the purchase of a Mercedes at 6 to 8 per cent from the banking system.”

The average loan of the Grameen bank is $130 in Bangladesh, lower in India. Now, the basic problem of the poor in both countries is landlessness, lack of assets.

From Scientific American:

Nothing focuses the mind’s eye like an erotic picture, according to the results of a new study. Even when such pictures were actively canceled out, subliminal images of female nudes helped heterosexual men find the orientation of a briefly shown abstract shape. Such nudity-driven focusing worked almost as well for women, as long as the image accorded with their sexual preference.

Cognitive neuroscientist Sheng He of the University of Minnesota and his colleagues gathered groups of heterosexual men, heterosexual women, homosexual men and bisexual women numbering 10 each. Each viewed special images pointed directly at each individual eye. The researchers could cancel out vision of one eye’s image by presenting a specific high contrast image to the other eye. Such an image, called a Gabor patch, consists of a series of contrasting lines that form an abstract–and visually arresting–shape. “Normally, the two eyes look at the same image. They don’t have any conflict,” he explains. “We create a situation where the two eyes are presented with two images, and then they will have binocular competition. One image is high contrast [and dynamic], the other is static. You basically just see the dynamic image.”

More here.

From Nature:

Fat could send the wrong signals to sick cells.

In studies with mice, shedding a bit of weight acted as a preventative against cancers. And they didn’t even have to exercise to get the benefit: the mouse equivalent of liposuction did the trick. Allan Conney and his colleagues at Rutgers University in New Jersey chopped the excess fat from some mice and exposed them to UV light, damaging some of their skin cells and inducing sunburn. The fat reduction boosted the rate of helpful cell suicide, called apoptosis, in skin tumour cells: cancerous cells died twice as fast in the slimmed-down mice as in the fat ones, they report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Mice kept slim by regular exercise also felt a benefit. The team saw no effect on non-cancerous cells in any of the mice.

“Fat tissue may be preventing the death of damaged cells,” says Conney. He and his team suggest that fat cells might be secreting proteins called cytokines, which usually act as cellular messengers and could send signals to tumour cells telling them to interrupt apoptosis. They also implicate another molecule called insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1), known to have a similar anti-suicide effect on cells. But these are speculations that the group has yet to test.

More here.

Lynn Geesaman. Parc de Bagatelle, Paris, France. 1995.

Gelatin silver print.

More of Ms.Geesaman’s work here and here.

Peter Hainsworth reviews Dante: the poet, the political thinker, the man by Barbara Reynolds, in the Times Literary Supplement:

The shape is familiar – a chronological survey of Dante’s life and career, with ample exposition of all the important works, and with an emphasis on their autobiographical implications. But the novelties come thick and fast, beginning (so far as I was concerned) with the suggestion on page 10 that Dante and other poets he associated with in Florence as a young man might have given their visionary and dreamlike imaginings a boost with the stimulus of love-potions. These herbal stimulants, cannabis perhaps, may, it turns out later, be what Dante is referring to in the comparison, near the start of Paradiso, between his own “trans-human” experience and what Glaucus felt “on tasting of the herb” (nel gustar dell’erba) which made him into a sea-god. As Reynolds explains at greater length when she comes to the final vision of the Godhead, mystics did often use drugs of one kind or another in conjunction with fasting and meditation in their pursuit of visionary illumination. There is no reason, she argues, why Dante should not have done so too.

Dante as a substance abuser? It is not a key argument and Reynolds may be being provocative, even mischievous. She herself gives much more importance to her decoding of the two prophecies that have always been a problem for Dante commentators. Virgil says, in the first canto of the Comedy, that a hound (Veltro) will be coming to chase away the ever-hungry she-wolf that is afflicting Italy. Reynolds goes along with the standard view that Dante is talking of a new, righteous Emperor, but argues that the real interest lies in the puzzling phrase “tra feltro e feltro” (between felt and felt), which she sees as an allusion to the use of felt in contemporary paper-manufacture; Dante, she argues, is referring to the new power of written texts, and specifically to the imminent imposition of the rule of canon and civil law.

More here.

David Brooks reviews Andrew Sullivan’s The Conservative Soul.

Sullivan’s antidote to fundamentalism is the conservatism of doubt. “The defining characteristic of the conservative is that he knows what he doesn’t know,” Sullivan writes. “As humans we can merely sense the existence of a higher truth, a greater coherence than ourselves, but we cannot see it face to face,” he argues. So politics should be about acknowledging what we don’t know, and being cautious in what we think we can achieve.

His first great guide is Montaigne, who wrote, Sullivan notes, that God is incomprehensible and that everything we think we know about him is a projection of ourselves. We need to acknowledge that he and his truth are beyond our categories.

Sullivan’s next guide is Michael Oakeshott, the great British philosopher, who brilliantly exposed the limits of rationalism. As Sullivan says, “There is no way, Oakeshott argues, to generate a personal moral life from a book, a text, a theory. We live the way we have grown accustomed to live. Our morality is like a language we have learned and deploy in every new instant.”

Politics is not an effort to find solutions and realize ideals, in this view. It is merely an effort to find practical ways to preserve one’s balance in a complicated world. An Oakeshottian conservative will reject great crusades. He will not try to impose morality or base policy decisions on so-called eternal truths.

Of course neither would this kind of conservative write the Declaration of Independence.

Elizabeth Rubin in the New York Times Magazine:

One afternoon this past summer, I shared a picnic of fresh mangos and plums with Abdul Baqi, an Afghan Taliban fighter in his 20’s fresh from the front in Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan. We spent hours on a grassy slope under the tall pines of Murree, a former colonial hill station that is now a popular resort just outside Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad. All around us was a Pakistani rendition of Georges Seurat’s “Sunday on La Grande Jatte” — middle-class families setting up grills for barbecue, a girl and two boys chasing their errant cow with a stick, two men hunting fowl, boys flying a kite. Much of the time, Abdul Baqi was engrossed in the flight pattern of a Himalayan bird. It must have been a welcome distraction. He had just lost five friends fighting British troops and had seen many others killed or wounded by bombs as they sheltered inside a mosque.

He was now looking forward to taking a logic course at a madrasa, or religious school, near Peshawar during his holiday. Pakistan’s religious parties, he told me through an interpreter, would lodge him, as they did other Afghan Taliban fighters, and keep him safe. With us was Abdul Baqi’s mentor, Mullah Sadiq, a diabetic Helmandi who was shuttling between Pakistan and Afghanistan auditing Taliban finances and arranging logistics. He had just dispatched nine fighters to Afghanistan and had taken wounded men to a hospital in Islamabad. “I just tell the border guards that they were wounded in a tribal dispute and need treatment,” he told me.

More here.

Olivia Wu in the San Francisco Chronicle:

When Fan Wu was feverishly tapping out her first novel in San Jose four years ago, she did not imagine she would star in the launch of a major publishing house. At the 13th Annual Beijing Book Fair, Macmillan Press announced the formation of Picador Asia, its newest imprint dedicated to the Asia Pacific region — the only Asian list created by a mainstream English language publisher — and brought out its first book, “February Flowers,” by Chinese-born Wu. Wu (no relation to this reporter) wrote the novel in English partly to challenge herself in her second language.

Publishers from around the world arrived at the book fair, one of the major publishing events in China, earlier this month to search for, develop and publish Chinese writers. Major houses, such as Penguin and HarperCollins, continued to press forward with translations of English classics into Chinese and emphasis on children’s books. More than 4,000 local and international publishers turned up.

Many consider the greatest loophole in Chinese-English publishing efforts to be contemporary Chinese voices in English.

More here.